


A Pacific Girl in America

by purplebard



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Abandonment, F/F, Gaslighting, Illustrated, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Non-Chronological, POV Third Person Omniscient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:36:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 54,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplebard/pseuds/purplebard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Harley has been missing in action for three months. When his wife and student-slash-sorta-daughter hunt him down, they find a devil dog and a little girl who is alarmingly smart but not very articulate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is not 100% self-indulgence and everyone who states otherwise will be reported and uninvited from my birthday party

     It is becoming night, and this means what it always means.

     Rose Lalonde and Jade Harley are huddled underneath one of the scratchier quilts from Rose’s bed, their chins propped on their knees and the flashlight hollowing out their little faces. Jade thinks this quilt smells rather like a retirement home, or at least like someone left their great aunt outside in a rainstorm. It’s a little hard to breathe. Nothing else is thick enough to smother the light, though. Rose’s mom will stumble down the hallway sooner or later, her fingers tracing the wall for support, and she will sigh with contentment and make her way to bed when she sees that there is only darkness seeping out from the bottom of the door. In the morning, she’ll ruffle Jade’s hair on her way to her brother’s car and poke fun of “you kids” for tiring so quickly. _Silly girls_.

     “And anyway, no one really knows why it is that we dream, or how,” Rose continues.

     She’s pulled her headband out for the night, and her close-cut hair traces her head like a halo. It shines in the bright white of the flashlight propped upright between her feet, and Jade will realize in only a moment why it is that Rose wants to start bleaching her hair. It would suit her. Ten is too young to be frying your hair, though, says Ms. Lalonde.

     “Our minds are very primitive in the subconscious, when you get down to it. Your deepest self can’t even invent a face – everyone in the crowds of our sleep, all those random people you’ve never seen before, they’re all people you’ve passed on the street, or seen on TV in your waking hours. Our lived experiences become the miasma of what makes up our dreams.”

     Jade burrows her chin deeper between her knees. From Rose’s view, the spheres of her lenses have gone white. It gives her a look like a banshee, unintentionally rendering her words ominous.

     “All right, but what if they’re not taking place in your head?”

     “Our dreams?”

     “Yes.”

     Rose gives Jade a flat and even stare, only the faintest twitch of her eyebrow betraying her surprise. “Oh, I see. You’re implying you believe in astral projection.”

     “Says the girl who did all her workbook pages the hour before school started ‘cause she was up all night reading _The Necronomicon_.”

     “I can appreciate fiction for fiction’s sake.”

     Jade snorts. “Okay.”

     “So what you’re telling me is that you’re astral projecting every night, I take it?”

     “I don’t think it’s outside the _realm of possibility_ ,” Jade hoots, putting on her best posh accent. Rose relents and gives a small laugh, and they snort behind their hands to keep the volume down. “What say you, oh great professor?”

     Down in the cellar, the furnace can be heard roaring to life.

     “I find the overwhelming wash of yellow in your dreams troubling. We can go the Fitzgerald route. We can say that you feel your life is a gilded, superficial farce, so much so that your entire world is awash in the color of decay and deceit.”

     “Oh, very nice.” Jade claps slowly. “I’m having a breakthrough. How _do_ you do it?”

     “The chess folk are another matter. They are entirely white, yes?”

     “Yup!”

     “Going down the biblical branch, we can interpret this as meaning that you find the others around you to be pure of heart and spirit. They are ‘saved,’ while you are not. You feel perhaps resentment, but mostly guilt that you are not in the echelons of the innocent.”

     “Yeah right, the carapacians rock. They love me.”

     Rose blinks. “Carapacians.”

     “Uh, yeah.” Jade wrings her long hair in her hands, and a quiet wisp of cool air slips under the blanket. They both breathe in, covetous of the draft. “You have normal, boring dreams then? You have no idea what I’m talking about?”

     “I tend not to remember my dreams.”

     “Somehow I doubt that.”

     And somehow, Jade knows what lurks on the tip of Rose’s tongue.

     “Is it possible you’re mistaking the remarkability of a recurring dream for something that spans beyond human experience?”

     There it is. Rose thinks Jade is a pathological liar, and Jade knows that Rose suspects this, and Rose has a hunch that Jade might know that Rose knows this. Something cold passes between them – for Jade, the tired feeling of not being understood by a dear friend. For Rose, it is only a curious and wounded suspicion, for how could the one girl she’s known the longest make something like this up? For attention, for bragging rights? Rose does not know what to call it.

     Ah, but then here’s the sound of Madame Lalonde trundling down the hall. Tonight she hums something low and indistinct, and as her footsteps creak, Jade sees the weariness leak into Rose’s features. Her mouth settles into a soft frown, and then her thumb is switching the flashlight off. She throws the blanket off of their heads, and both girls breathe in the air.

     “We have lessons tomorrow,” Rose murmurs into her pillow once she’s thrown herself under the quilt. It’s true. Jade meets her Arabic tutor not long after eleven, and Rose has violin even earlier than that. “You should try to sleep, Gigi.”

     The use of her nickname – the sounded-out version of her chumhandle’s abbreviation – reassures Jade and calms her down. She lowers herself gently, breathing in the lavender scent of the pillow that’s become more familiar than her own room. There is an unspoken challenge about Roses words – _just try and tell me again that you go to a golden moon in your sleep_. Rose’s eyes are already shut, and Jade searches her face.

 

 

     Perhaps we should take a few steps back.

 

 

     It is a brilliant and unseasonably warm day in Maple Valley, Washington. The air is crisp, the sun a little too bright. The wind blows in from the neighboring village, Hauntswitch – so classified a village because the WASPs who founded it thought that it might increase property value. For the beginning of December, Roxanne Lalonde barely needs a coat. She folds her arms inside of her stark black shawl, and the corner of her mouth twitches when she sees Dr. Harley reappear from the car. The shadow of trunks and suitcases can be seen from the curb.

     Today is December the first, 1996.

     “I shouldn’t be here,” Roxanne says. Dr. Harley looks at her, and it’s hard for him to tell if she’s angry, but her crumpled eyebrows can be seen past her circular sunglasses. “If you would _only_ let me use the jet like you said you’d ‘consider,’” she complains, tossing up air quotes with manicured hands, “I’d be in Houston in plenty of time. I could be back here before that crater has time to stop smoking.”

     Dr. Harley says nothing. It drives Roxanne crazy when he does this – that is, leaving her in such long pauses that she falls into a trench of doubt. Perhaps he hopes she’ll draw her own conclusions if he stays quiet and lets her figure out the answer for herself.

     They stand watching the sky, eyeing the little white clouds sail past. Roxanne thinks they move unusually quickly. Maybe they’re hurrying out of the way before the impact arrives.

 

     “That meteor isn’t meant for you, Roxanne.”

     “I can’t want what’s best for my children?”

     She flinches as soon as she says it. She isn’t even thirty yet, the ink on her master’s degree barely dry – to think she’s about to be responsible for another living creature that only has _two_ legs. Jesus. It’s terrifying, but somehow so exciting she feels her lungs balloon with yellow joy. Whenever that child comes blasting out of the sky, she will already be head over heels.

     “What’s best is committing yourself to what you know you’re able to accomplish. You cannot stretch yourself out like that, and we both know it. All you can do is let her know she’s loved.”

     A sharp wind passes through, rattling Roxanne’s earrings. In some street behind them, two excited dogs bark at one another with the shared joy of meeting a new friend.

     It smarts to hear this from him. If all this research is to be believed, if Roxanne can trust the primordial stew of memories that bubbles up in her sleep and pricks at the surface with the sharp tang of a forgotten name, then her child will soon be out there, and they will be in a nameless danger that chills her to the nerve. But that meteor is not for Roxanne.

     Of course he would never understand how badly she wants to swoop to that child’s aid, to rescue them from the savage sun and glinting skyscrapers. He doesn’t understand how many people she’d be willing to beat back with the full weight of her Michael Kors bag. For Dr. Harley, it’s always been hard to differentiate parenting and apprenticeship. Sometimes your daughter becomes nothing more than your protégé. Well, in her case, at least. Isn’t the first child always the guinea pig?

     “Are you still thinking about New York?” he finally asks.

     “Are you still thinking about the Pacific fucking Ocean?” Roxanne bites back.

     “Language, Roxanne.” His gruff tone nearly makes her bite down hard on her bright pink nails – a habit from childhood. “In any case, I wish you would stay. The kids will want you here.”

     “They’ll want you here even more.”

     For an instant so brief she’ll later be sure she imagined it, Dr. Harley almost seems to shift uncomfortably. Surely he didn’t. Dr. Harley’s boots always stay firmly on the ground. An unmovable object minus the unstoppable force.

     “I know.”

     “What about the little straggler? The one in April?”

     Her father-slash-tutor’s face turns stony again. Dr. Harley pushes his glasses up, his moustache twitching.

     “It’s out of our control.”

 

 

     Where’s that fast forward button again? Ah, yes.

 

 

     It is Thursday, and this means that Jude Harley has allowed himself the day off. The client for whom he’s writing _Martians Stole My Farmland for Interstellar Condominiums_ doesn’t expect the second draft for another month. This one is lenient, as they all tend to be – they want to slap their name on a kitschy Amazon bestseller without actually having to sit down and type it out. The perk of being a ghost writer is that you have your own schedule, but it’s only a perk if you have good time management skills. Jude has no such thing.

     The front door rattles – a fault with the deadlock he keeps meaning to fix – and there’s the daily sound of Jade dumping her bag on the floor and sighing, followed by the clicking nails of Becquerel coming to greet his favorite human. The long uphill trudge towards Harley Manor always leaves her winded, and her mumbles sound weary as she stoops to talk to her dog. Then her footsteps pitter out, probably lost as she wanders into the kitchen. Jude closes out of his Internet tab and shuts his computer. What sounds _much_ better than writing novellas about extraterrestrial land development is hanging out with his baby sister.

 

     Jude always decides to wait a while before going down to bug Jade. He knows from experience how annoying it can be to have your guardian fall upon you like carrion the minute you walk through the door, even if it comes from a good place. When he finally treads downstairs in his “working slippers” (the Area 51 pair he bought on a long stretch of Nevada highway), Jade is sitting on the marble counter. The heels of her Mary Janes thump against the wood as she swings her legs. She’s already yanked off her woolen uniform sweater; the embroidered emblem of Antler Creek Middle School looks nightmarish inside-out, white stag eyes bulging.

     “Hey, Josie and the Pussycats,” Jude says. He snatches the box of Froot Loops from her hands and grabs a handful. By the back door, Becquerel lifts his head at the sound and rests it once more on his paws when he realizes it isn’t doggy treats.

     “Hello, Jason and the Argonauts.”

     They can go back and forth like this until the other relents and changes the subject. Both are unsure how this tradition started – it may have been when a small and inarticulate Jade was utterly incapable of telling the family names apart.

     “How’s school, Judith and Holofernes?”

     Jade shrugs. The uniform makes her look muted, gray and white plaids dampening the girl who can’t go a day without pastel. When she rolls her sleeves up, Jude sees the rainbow bands hidden on her wrist. “Pretty cool. Me and Rose finally figured out where the gap between the bookshelves in the library goes. We asked the librarian for a call number that doesn’t exist and took it from there.”

     “Is that the truth?” Jude plants a hand on his hip. “Don’t leave me hanging, what’s the scoop? Is it coal miner treasure? Flint arrowhead reserves?”

     “Actually, I think it was more of a spider reserve.”

     Jude shudders, then picks a tuft of white silk from Jade’s hair. It’s puffed up towards the end where she always gets tired of straightening it.

     “The more you know, right?”

     Jude hops up onto the opposite counter, leaning his head against the glass cabinet doors which house the china. The grandfather clock in the dining room can be heard, the heavy pendulum swinging back and forth. One of many clocks in the manor that are wholly out of sync, chiming their hours minutes apart. An uneven metronome for the rhythm of the household.

     “Wanna play ‘Antiques Roadshow?’” Jude asks.

     Jade’s face splits into a smile, and she crunches on a last Froot Loop.

 

     “Antiques Roadshow” is the Harley way of assessing the mounds of priceless treasures their father left behind. Game trophies of grizzlies and moose, taxidermy foxes and mountain lions. Sparkling bits of obelisks unearthed from expeditions in the Gulf, friezes and incomplete suits of armor and skeletons of jungle snakes. Specimens in bell-shaped jars, urns rimmed with malachite, sparkling English plates used only once for a Georgian banquet. They seep into the cracks of his absence and exude a dusty sadness, and no matter how much space they fill, the halls always give a horribly lonely echo. This house was not meant for two people and a dog – it never was. The Roadshow gives it all life and humor once again, reclaiming those countless artifacts from the late Dr. Harley’s imposing shadow.

     Jude thinks he’s done well with this one. In the parlor, Jade sits with her legs crossed on the gilded-edged sofa. It coughs with age each time she shifts. Jude adjusts his imaginary tie and presents a painting from one of the drawing rooms.

     “Now, Miss Harley, today you’ve brought us this wonderful find. Tell us the story of how this incredible painting came into your possession.”

     “ _Well_ ,” Jade starts, planting a hand on her chest, “This has been hanging in my family home for over twenty years. It was my great aunt’s, and she always claimed it was painted by blind opossums. I just thought it was the most charming thing, and following her untimely death after brawling with a nightclub bouncer, I’ve been keeping it right over the fireplace.”

     “Your great aunt was not far off the mark,” Jude sniffs. “What we have here is a classic example of Danish Raccoonism, which ran for a short period in the eighteenth century. When an increase of starving artists led to a number of Danish masters losing their hands for bread pilfering, many took to training the raccoons who came to pick the crumbs of slob from their naked bodies. By using their feet to splatter the paint, an artist could create a work of art by coaxing his flea-ridden colleague across the canvas. What we’re left with is an impressionistic, bold statement piece far before Manet’s time. Truly remarkable work.”

     In reality, this _could_ be a Seurat – neither sibling are very interested in art history. It might even be some Fauve lost to history, who knows! In any case, it doesn’t mesh with the Dr.’s tastes at all. He probably acquired it with the goal of selling it off for a higher bid later, but never got the chance to complete the investment.

     "Who ever knew that an unholy sewer gremlin could produce such beautiful work?” Jade gasps. Underneath the sofa, Bec yawns and stretches out his paws.

     “It takes the dual talents of artistic genius and a knack for animal domestication.” Jude nods sagely. “Do you know how much your great aunt paid for this painting?”

     “Why, I believe she threatened the local peddler with her toothbrush shiv from Alcatraz until he gave it up and left town!”

     “She was a wise buyer. We can see a few tears in the upper left corner – perhaps a mark left behind by our frothing co-artist – and that can work for or against the final price. You may also wish to get it reframed. This one simply won’t do! Frankly, it smells of rotting garbage. Perhaps leftover from the raccoons as well?”

     “No, my great aunt just lived in squalor.”

     “Very well. Do you want to guess how much this specimen is worth?”

     Jade rubs her chin. “I’d say… two Snapple bottle caps and a box of Marlboro’s.”

     Jude places his hands together and steeples his fingers. “Miss Harley… you may be pleased to know... that this painting is worth a whole half-dollar.”

     Jade fakes a swoon, throwing her wrist limply over her forehead and collapsing against the pillows. Filled with genuine alarm, Becquerel leaps up and licks her face.

 

 

     It is five thirty on an otherwise insignificant Friday, and that means that Jade Harley and Rose Lalonde have been released from Friday school. It also means that Joey Claire has risked a speeding ticket from the Maple Valley Police in order to pick them up in time, on top of kicking out two students who were taking too long to get their street clothes on while she was locking up the dance studio. She could leave them to wait for her on the front steps if she wanted – it’d teach them a lesson, probably – but Joey shivers at the thought of them giving up and walking home after the sun has already set.

     “I really don’t know why you girls insist on getting yourselves detention so often,” Joey sighs. “This’ll bite you in the ass when you’re applying for college. You wanna know how many apps I filled out that asked for my disciplinary record? A lot.”

     Jade and Rose sit in the back of her SUV, looking in opposite directions. Jade rubs a patch of rough plastic on the armrest, while Rose picks at the stitching on the strap of her messenger bag. They look sullen, but Joey knows that they’re trying to fool her – smirking and giggling at each other before she pulled up to get them, Joey is fully aware that these kids don’t regret shit.

     She sees a lot of herself in them. Not in any part due to shared genetics, seeing as there are none, but maybe spending enough time in that crazy house on the hill just does something to a kid. Especially if that house is devoid of the person who made it crazy in the first place. After a certain point, Joey stopped being satisfied with being ignored. It wasn’t enough to hole herself up in her room and play her SNES and flip through Livejournal. And then it wasn’t enough to line the back wall with mason jars from the basement and knock them off one by one with stones. And then it wasn’t enough to be a good, bright, promising student, so she added frequent detention to the list of ways to fill her time. It hurt her teachers to see her “waste her potential” – it might’ve hurt her mom, too, if she was mentally present enough to notice. Joey is sure that Rose would love to use her as a lab rat for her kiddie playtime psychiatrist sessions. She’d take out a _Squiddles!_ notepad and jot down notes about how the disappearance of her father and its absence of closure contributed to Joey’s more outrageous behavior as years went on.

     “Look, okay… actually _doing_ stupid shit, I get. Really, I get it! You have no clue how much stuff I got away with in school. Sure, I never got ‘Save Joey’ spray-painted on a local water tower, but I had a reputation, y’know? When Jude got to high school, his teachers were always keeping an eye on him because they thought he’d turn out like me.” Joey chews her gum loudly like she always does when she’s driving, drumming her fingers on the wheel as she waits to turn out of the high school’s driveway. “The trick is getting _away_ with it, though. I don’t care what you get up to, but can’t you be more subtle about it?”

     “I don’t see the purpose of not getting credit where credit is due,” Rose mumbles from the back. Jade snorts at this and then purses her lips, disguising it as a cough. Joey glances at them from the rearview mirror and blinks slowly.

     “What did you even do this time? Rearrange the _World Book_ encyclopedias to say ‘Boob Dick?’”

     Rose smiles, and in the mirror Joey can see her lick her front teeth to get the lipstick off. Joey was certain that Roxanne’s little Punky Brewster would leave the black makeup behind in sixth grade, but the goth phase is still going strong.

     "Nope!” Jade pipes up. Joey flinches at the suddenness of her low, whistling voice. “The biology teacher has lunch during the same period as us, so we went to the room where she keeps the frogs and we –”

     “Okay, okay, nevermind!” Joey interrupts. “Forget I asked.”

     On the radio, a Nirvana song Joey has never liked comes on. She flips to a few of her other presets, then turns the radio off when they all turn out to be commercials. The car in front of them is cruising at a nice twenty miles per hour, so Joey mumbles something under her breath and switches into the next lane.

     Jade fumbles with the front pocket of her backpack and gets out her phone. Rose watches out of the corner of her eye as Jade opens Pesterchum.

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] at 15:41 --

GG: did you ever find out what happened to the last frog?  
GG: the one with the messed up leg, i mean

     Rose feels her phone vibrate from the shallow pocket in her uniform skirt, then fishes it out and reads the notification on her lock screen.

TT: Ah yes, good old Toadlouse-Lautrec.  
TT: Where did you last see him?  
GG: pretty sure he disappeared down the uncovered vent in the english depts hallway :/ or maybe that was the other one… they all look so similar  
TT: Wrong.  
GG: ??  
TT: Would you like to phone a friend?

 

  
GG: as a matter of fact YES. i choose my smart and lovely friend miss rose. ring ring ring!!!!  
TT: You’ve reached the Lalonde landline. How may I help you?  
GG: yes i am looking for a very slippery amphibian friend of mine who may have gotten lost on a classic round of wacky antics. would you happen to know where he is????  
TT: Check your bag.

     Jade blinks, confused, and feels something thump inside of her backpack. She unzips the main zipper, making sure that Joey’s eyes are on the road, and slowly peers inside. Then she makes eye contact with a crooked-legged frog sitting on top of her pencil bag. Jade coughs loudly to cover up its subsequent ribbit.

     "Are you getting sick or something?” Joey asks. Her turn signal clicks, and then they’re two blocks from the wooden sign declaring the beginning of Hauntswitch Village.

     “No!” Jade says. “Just have a frog in my throat, I guess.”

     Rose bursts into laughter at this, and Joey rolls her eyes.

 

           

     It is very unusual having a birthday in the same week as your best friend. Ms. Lalonde has been cracking jokes about it all week – two Big Thirteens in just a matter of days must mean terrible tidings. Too bad the Lalonde’s don’t have a black cat anymore. Then the imaginary symbolism would really be complete.

     Rose has been spending the last couple of nights at Harley Manor. The entire time frame has been a haze, tote bags of pajamas and toothbrushes sprawled on the floor among backpacks and imminently due homework. Rose is unabashed with her love for the house. Something about the dusty smell settling into the Persian rugs and the spots of black tarnish on every hall mirror simply can’t compare to her own home’s white, sterile, modern art museum vibe. She’s competing with Jade on who can find the grossest heirloom to sneak on top of their combo birthday cake without rendering it inedible. A Very Addam’s Family Birthday.

     The Harley’s basement is unusable, so they spend most of their time in Jade’s room. It used to be Joey’s – ancient glow-in-the-dark stars stick to the ceiling, a height chart carved into the doorframe with multicolored pens, deep scratches on the bottom of the door from where their previous dog must have clawed at it. It’s much too big a room for just one child, Rose thinks as she lazes in the window alcove. The sun filters in past the hanging pots of ferns, bright and fuzzy, and Rose adjusts the purple Squiddle she’s appropriated as a pillow.

     “Are you asleep?” Jade asks from her bed. Her music plays softly from the speaker of her laptop.

     Rose’s eyes flutter open to the electrical thrumming. She stretches her legs out, her fleece pajama pants creating static against the seat cushion.

     “Not yet,” she murmurs.

     Outside, a crow drones in the tree branches. The late afternoon sun warms Rose’s face, and Jade watches the consciousness slip from her face. Her folded fingers relax, her fringes falling out of her face. And then she really is asleep. _Finally_. Jade rolls over and pulls the blanket up to her chest, grinning.

 

     Rose lurches awake and is surprised to find that her arms are prickled with goosebumps. A cold draft puffs in through the crack in Jade’s window – her window? – but she can hardly feel it through the eerie sensation of floating outside her body.

     There are men in the room. Rose inhales sharply and pulls her comforter to her chin. Hers! Yes, this is her room, but since when was it so _purple_? Since when were her pajamas so smooth?

     There are still men in the room. Stupid, stupid, don’t get distracted! Rose blinks to adjust to the violet and the lime green splattering her walls and sees that there are two shiny, stout little men standing over an open hatch in the floor. Where did her door go? Ah, but that’s not important right now, because the little men have spears, very deadly-looking ones at that, and neither of them seem pleased. But Rose is not their subject of interest at the moment.

     “This is an unlawful entry of royal property!” one of them barks. Their faces are obsidian, insectoid jaws clicking together like a crustacean’s. “Delivery of postal material is forbidden without going through the Dersite Customs Office!”

     “Yeah, yeah, so you can tear the packaging apart and dump it in the trash?” their captive shoots back. Her voice is high and airy, and her exoskeleton is a blinding white against the guards on either side of her. Her hat is askew, a dingy messenger bag slung over her chest. Rose examines her hands, grasping at her own neck where the spears interlock to restrain her, and sees that they’re jointed like a doll’s.

     This has to be a dream, Rose thinks. The fact that this thought occurs to her is surprising in itself – she’s never been so self-aware in her sleep that she could identify a dream while it was unfolding. Everything is just a bit too crisp, a little sharp at the edges, a little cold. Rose becomes aware of a heavy darkness just outside her window.

     “Our screening methods are none of your concern,” the other guard says in a gravelly tone. “What _is_ your concern is how big a fine you’ll spit out for barging into the princess’ tower with potentially sabotaged mail.”

     Rose pushes her fringe out of her face and lowers her quilt. “Excuse me…?”

     The white figure scoffs. “Sabotaged! Sir, I have _dignity_ , dignity that is directly tied to me delivering this post in one piece. If you expect me to leave my job at your doorstep and trust the rest to those careless slobs, you have another thing coming!”

     Rose swallows the cotton in her throat. “Excuse me!”

     The argument screeches to a halt, and three monochrome heads turn to look at her. The guards seem shocked that she’s awake at all. Their spears lower from the mailwoman’s neck, and one of them elbows the other.

     Her heart continues to thump. Now that she’s got their attention, she doesn’t know what to do with it. Rose’s legs curl under the quilt, and she turns her gaze to the white-shelled little figure.

     “I believe you have mail for me?” Rose asks.

     The mailwoman nods, a relieved look crashing over her, and as she steps forward the guards take her by the wrists.

     “Where do you think you’re going?” one snaps.

     “She thinks she’s doing her job,” Rose replies coolly. “And she’ll do it.” She forces a small smile. “Well, what do you have there?”

     The guards grudgingly let her go, and the postwoman clears her throat. She makes her way over to Rose until she’s a foot away from the bed, her bare feet thunking hollowly on the damask carpet, and then her doll hand dives into the messenger bag. She takes out a single envelope, thin and unbent, and hands it dutifully across the sheets. Her stance gives her the appearance of a recruited soldier on the first day of boot camp.

     Rose takes the envelope, and as soon as the parcel is out of her hands, the postwoman snaps her bag shut. She gives her a questioning look, a slight _are-you-going-to-help-me-out-of-this_ tilt of the head, and Rose purses her lips.

     “You called me a princess, yes?” Rose asks the guards.

     They look at each other, blinking their beetle eyes slowly.

     “Well… yes, that’s what you are.”

     “All right. I can work with that.” Rose straightens the violet cuffs of her long sleeves. “Well, your princess is awake. And my first decree is that you let this woman get on with her route.”

     “We… well, if that’s… what….” They trail off, murmuring to each other and shrugging. Then they rest the butts of their spears on the carpet, and one of them stands aside to allow the mailwoman down the hatch.

     She gives an inaudible sigh, shoots Rose a look of gratitude, and in seconds the bright white mark of her is gone. When her footsteps fade, the guards give awkward bows and follow her down. Then Rose is alone again.

 

     A few moments are spent examining the room before Rose even remembers the envelope in her hands. The silence is deafening, a churning and uncomfortable _sound_ exuding from somewhere outside the walls. It rings in her hears and makes the purple sickly. She breathes in a smell like nighttime, a smell like fine dust and pennies and TV static, and when her fingers clench she jumps at the sound of crinkling paper.

     Ah, right. The mail. Rose digs one finger under the flap, mangling it in the process. Her fingernails aren’t long enough to shear it open – the result of a bad habit. Finally the crumpled envelope gives way to show a single slip of paper inside, and Rose tugs it out. It’s folded over nice and neatly, and from the blank side, Rose can already tell that there’s scarcely a full sentence written on it. She wills her shaking fingers to settle, still unaccustomed to this foreign and cumbersome new body, unfolds the note, and feels a massive weight of retrospective embarrassment crash down on her.

 

Meet me on Prospit!

     <3 Gigi


	2. Chapter 2

     It is the seventeenth of March, 2000, and this means that Dr. Claire has not heard from her husband in over three months.

     Let’s get some things straight about Dr. Claire. She is not the swooning secretary type, if it can be said that such a character exists in real life at all. It takes a real powerhouse to stand up to the enigmatic Dr. Harley, and for Dr. Claire, the void was the first to blink. Anyone capable of winning full custody of a babbling baby daughter while spending the divorce proceedings in a Roman catacomb is a force to be reckoned with, let alone a woman who pursued her doctorate to stick it to a family who didn’t think she’d make it without a husband.

     A perusal through her leather-bound photo albums would tell you that she’s been everywhere her prestigious second husband has been. Really, she’s technically been to _more_ , considering she’s quicker on her feet than the elderly Dr. Harley. Who cleared the top of Machu Picchu while he was resting two stories below, leaning against the moss-encrusted stone and dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief? That’s right: Dr. Claire. She is his assistant in title only.

     Dr. Claire has been known to accept the absurd as bona fide truth, given that the evidence stacks up. Her second husband learns this when he reads the paper that earned her her late-in-life PhD – a dissertation on why the kingdom of Atlantis was very real, because it was actually Ireland all along. It isn’t that she’s silly or stupid or seeking attention through showy headlines. Dr. Claire simply has a taste for the colorful underside of history and the sciences, and it is this quirk that drew Dr. Harley to her.

     So when he revealed to his wife that he was translating an ancient code which would bring about the end of the world, Dr. Claire kept an open mind.

 

     The two doctors met in 1977 at the opening of a natural history museum in Potsdam. Dr. Harley brought along a small companion, an eight-year-old girl whose dress was a pink splotch among dark and satiny evening wear.

     -  Alice Claire, I presume? asked Dr. Harley. Your thesis in _The Journal of Grecian Revisionism_ was something else.

     He needed no introduction. Dr. Claire took in a sharp inhale, recognizing the man at once. Dr. Harley was an elusive man for one who had accomplished so much – his Wikipedia article was still a stub – and his features were as unyielding as in his photos. Was he even smiling at all, or was the moustache disguising any semblance of emotion? She swallowed hard and tried not to mangle her response.

     - Yes, that’s right, Dr. Claire replied. Her fingers shook around the stem of her champagne glass. Coming from you, Dr. Harley, it means a great deal.

     - Please, call me Jacob.

     The little girl rolled her eyes. Bored with the grown-ups, she turned her attention to the massive pterosaur hanging over the crowd. Dr. Claire glanced at her as her tiny hand gripped Jacob’s cuff. For a flash of a moment, she noticed the same wide, glassy look in her eyes that would sometimes cross her own Joanne’s face.

     - Is this your granddaughter, Jacob? Quite a big event for such a little girl. She must feel very fortunate.

     - No, no. Jacob waved his hand, and Dr. Claire observed how calloused his fingers were. A stark contrast to the golden cufflinks and the sharp angle of his metallic glasses. Roxy here is the daughter of my two best students. Say hello, Roxanne.

     - Hello, the girl muttered. She looked up tentatively into Dr. Claire’s face, then returned her gaze to the room around her.

     - You see she’s more of an observer than a talker. Quite an astute little eye on her. I’ve been entrusted with her while her parents complete their field study in the Yukon.

     Roxy’s eyebrow seemed to twitch with annoyance at this, and she grasped her guardian’s hand more insistently. Perhaps she was already busy revising the story of her own life. Dr. Claire did not think to ask how long her parents had been gone.

 

     She would, however, see very much of Roxy and her caretaker as the months progressed. Their paths would continue to cross, the imposing Dr. Harley and the little girl tagging along after him with pink safari hats and Hello Kitty Band-Aids on her knees. He would invite her to an expedition in the northern Serengeti, or the coast of Greenland, or the furthermost tip of Chile, and she would bring the still-teething Joey along, and it was not until their fifth consecutive trip together that the border force confused them for a single family. Dr. Claire’s cheeks went ruddy, but her traveling companion only smiled and offered to take Joey off her hands.

 

     But now it is the year 2000, and the air is beginning to give way to spring, and the grass is still crisp and dewy in the mornings, and Dr. Claire’s husband is missing in action.

     Dr. Harley has not been without his periods of silence. Early on in their friendship, when it was more “business” and less “being married,” Dr. Claire called his office number to ask his opinion regarding an article a mutual friend had published. The department’s secretary picked up instead, saying that Dr. Harley was out for an undetermined amount of time. Where “out” happened to be, no one knew. It alarmed her how blasé this woman was about the disappearance of such a prestigious figure. How often must a man vanish off the map before it becomes routine?

     Three days later, the doctor called her back from his office and apologized for the missed connection. You know how hard it can be to get a good reception over the Indian Sea, he said. Dr. Claire did not know.

     His wife is not so fretful that a late letter will have her calling the National Guard. Even expedited mail takes weeks to reach that damned island. But Dr. Claire has an agreement with her husband which has lasted from the first day of their engagement: absolutely no mysterious disappearances allowed. She knew that whatever great force of nature called him away from home, she would be able to handle it – there were other things to do besides tag along on his adventures. Little Roxanne, however, could not bear his long and unexpected absences, let alone Joey. And so a large calendar was posted to the kitchen wall. _Dad leaves for Cairo April 27. Dad returns from Cairo May 15. Dad leaves for Jakarta May 19._

     And as she’s always been, Roxanne is the first to call attention to Dr. Harley’s absence.

     It isn’t unusual for Roxanne to materialize in her childhood home, since Harley Manor overlooks the gated community of Rainbow Run. There’s the sound of her letting herself in through the front door, then the plink of her spare key on the front table. Dr. Claire listens from her office, picking out the sound of her voice over the dull ticking of the clock. Her muffled words carry up through the vents – she must be in the kitchen, then. Jude is home for the spring break of his first year at university, and his voice mingles with hers. It goes light and airy as he crouches to talk to Roxanne’s small daughter, and Rose makes a sound of delight when Tesseract hobbles over to stick his wet nose in her face. And then Roxanne’s voice floats away, and the staircase creaks under her heels.

     Dr. Claire rests her chin on her steepled fingers, watching the mounted stag head across the office become speckled with light. A cloud outside passes over the sun and washes the room with gray. Lost in thought, she jumps when the door creaks open and Roxanne strides in.

     “Have you heard from him yet?” she asks bluntly.

     Dr. Claire blinks, a strand of graying hair falling in front of her eyes. “No, Roxanne.”

     She kisses her teeth, a loud smacking in the quiet room. “You know what this means, right?”

     “Enlighten me.”

     “It shouldn’t take that long for mail to reach us. I mean, _Christ_ , Alice, it’s not like he has much better to do over there than keep track of his family. He has Internet, you know. There’s no excuse for this.”

     “Isn’t there, though?”

     “He’s your _husband_ ,” Roxanne pleads. Her eyes go wide and glassy – still the little girl with the pink safari hats and the Hello Kitty Band-Aids – and Dr. Claire closes her eyes.

     “Jacob is undertaking work that neither of us can understand the full scope of.” Roxanne recoils at this, so Dr. Claire continues. “It’s not my goal to belittle you, Roxanne. He trusts you a great deal, and you know you’ve never proven yourself to be incapable. I’m at peace with knowing I’m not privy to all of Skaianet’s deepest secrets. Are you?”

     “What is he so afraid of, Alice? What doesn’t he want us to know?”

     Dr. Claire rubs her temple. “I doubt that I know any more than you do.”

     Roxanne pulls out the chair in front of Dr. Claire’s desk and sits. She crosses her legs and folds her hands, but her nerves can still be seen in the way she fiddles with the rings on her fingers.

     “The last codes we received were from December,” she murmurs. “He was getting so close to the end of the temple sequence. I _told_ him he’d figure it out faster if he brought a team with him, but he took it all so personally. Like it was his God-given quest to decode all those ruins by himself. If we don’t get the rest of the programming, Skaianet will just have to wing it.” Roxanne hangs her head. “I don’t even want to _think_ about how much sleep I’ll lose programming all the missing chunks. We’ll be lucky if that game gets finished at all.”

     She keeps her face hidden, and after a long pause, Dr. Claire almost thinks she hears a sniffle.

     “He wanted me to stay in Washington so badly,” she whispers. “Like the family would fall apart if I went through with New York. If he planned on coming back, why would it matter if I left?”

     “Don’t be morbid, Roxanne.”

     “It’s not just about him, you know. If something happened to him on that island, he’s not the only one at risk.”

     A cold ripple passes through Dr. Claire. This is the detail that she prefers to forget – that when her husband returns to the mainland, he’ll have a girl in his arms who has his face and his hair and his dark freckles. A girl who cannot pass as Dr. Claire’s daughter, who cannot pass for Joey or Jude’s because they are too young and she is too old and by now that child has the ability to _remember_. She will remember that Dr. Harley calls himself her grandfather. She will remember that no one else was there to claim her. There is no place for her in Harley Manor, and yet she belongs here more than anybody.

     In the first week of December, 1996, three meteors would enter Earth’s atmosphere, followed by a fourth in the second week of April. Each carrying its own lifeform, each lifeform with their own purpose carved into their DNA. Dr. Claire has been known to accept the absurd as bona fide truth, given that the evidence stacks up, and after many long nights spent in the Skaianet laboratory with her husband, she believes that Dr. Harley’s company is on the cusp of something apocalyptic – his words, not hers. The repellant feeling that stews in her gut is neither jealousy nor anger. She knows her husband is faithful to her. She knows the other half of that star child’s DNA is of no consequence to their marriage. She knows of ectobiology well enough, having watched Dr. Harley teach Roxanne what all of the switches and buttons and touch screens did when she was still only thirteen. She knows what comes out of those churning pipes and glass containment chambers – viscous ghost imprints, congealed concoctions of mixed genes. Perhaps this is what makes Dr. Claire feel so passive about the little girl on the Pacific island. Can someone be considered human if they come from chemical sludge and paradoxical froth?

     Ah, but a child is a child. She saw the little girl only briefly while her husband was at the docks, the last files from his office stowed away in the back of the boat which bore his granddaughter’s name. She reminded Alice terribly of her little Joanne – those wildly green eyes like something out of a game of Mancala, how fine and black her hair. It was the way Jacob _held_ her that was so different – he clasped her to him like his last hope of survival, the Edward VI to his Henry VIII. She was so sweet, so small, so convincingly _his_ child, and yet it was his desperate hold on her that made Alice uneasy. She was the culmination of the mad scientist’s research, a stitched-together amalgam of ectobiological slime which would, in time, fulfill the task given to her by her creator. The fact that this task would be the start of the apocalypse didn’t really help.

     Despite the uncanniness of it all, despite the glass vial she came from and the combination of button presses it took to create her, a child is a child. Human or nonhuman or something in between, she wouldn’t be able to look after herself. If something happened to Jacob on that island, he would not be the only one at risk. Dr. Claire sighs softly and nods her head.

     “Yes, Roxanne, you’re right about that. You know better than anyone how important those children are.”

     Downstairs, Tesseract gives a bark that’s gruff in his old age. Roxanne flinches at the distant sound of her daughter’s laughter.

     “We’ve always had the coordinates,” she murmurs. She crosses one leg over the other, the pointed black toe of her shoe skimming the desk. “There’s nothing stopping us from going after him.”

     Dr. Claire leans back in her chair, and the leather cushions sigh. “You’re forgetting the children. Joey may have moved out, but I’m not an empty nester yet. Neither are you.”

     “Jude could come with u–”

     “Absolutely not.” Dr. Claire’s lips twitch, and she plays with the wedding band on her finger, slipping it on and off again. There’s a faint tan line on her finger from how long she’s worn it. “If we go through with this, he’s staying in school. We tell the children nothing.”

     Roxanne chews the inside of her mouth. “I have the names of a few good nannies from my colleagues. Rose would be in good hands. She’s low maintenance.”

     Dr. Claire looks away. She focuses on a bell jar in her glass cabinet, a delicate bat skeleton sitting inside. Its wings look ready to snap, a tiny vertebrae so impossibly thin. Without knowing why, Dr. Claire begins to laugh. Roxanne’s eyebrows crumple.

     “You know,” Dr. Claire says between laughs, “I never expected Jacob to be gone so long. I thought he’d take samples of the dirt, comb the temple backwards and forwards with ten types of cameras, and get out of dodge. He never stays in one spot. It’s unbearable for him. Like he feels he’s being chased.”

     Roxanne’s face goes blank. “I know.”

     “To think he made a _home_ out there. You know, sometimes I want to feel offended. I wonder if he’s gotten tired of us all. I wonder whether some latent form of dementia has rendered him antisocial, and we just never saw the signs.” Dr. Claire adjusts the hem of her shirt, inhaling deeply to settle her heartbeat. “Can you believe I’ve never considered until now how _unnatural_ this is? This game is important, that much I understand, but to sequester yourself away… well, I just can’t wrap my head around it. What was so unappealing about us that he had to take that child thousands of miles away?”

     “There’s always been a method behind the madness,” Roxanne sighs, “but I agree that it’s gone too far this time. I haven’t seen him in so _long_ , Alice.” She plays with one of her earrings, her mouth scrunched up in a painful grimace. “I’m forgetting the details of his face. It terrifies me. If something went wrong, if he….”

     She stops abruptly, hiding her eyes behind her hand. Dr. Claire’s exhale rattles, and she sweeps the dark hair from her face. Roxanne is not her daughter, but she’s as close as one could get, and it pains Alice to see her so vulnerable. She’s still the little girl in the natural history museum, her pink dress sparkling with sequins as she gazes up with wonder at a plaster dinosaur. And now, in this very house, she has her own daughter for whom she would lay down her life. If Jacob feels the same way for his star child, then there’s no other option. There isn’t any way Dr. Claire could live with herself if she doesn’t ensure that those two are safe.

     “Please don’t cry, Roxy,” Dr. Claire murmurs. “We’re going to figure out what that old fool is up to, and we’ll drag him back kicking and screaming if we have to.”

      Roxanne wipes her eyes in one quick movement.

     “Yes,” she says. She nods, perhaps in agreement, but probably just to reassure herself. “Yes, I’m sure we will.”

 

 

     It is the fourteenth day of Dr. Claire and Dr. Lalonde’s voyage, and Dr. Claire is getting feverish.

     It started as seasickness. Too preoccupied with the task of sailing, Roxanne scarcely has time to check back on the woman lying pitifully in the belly of the vessel. Dr. Claire’s hair sticks to her forehead, and she fans herself with the same manila folders she’s brought over from her husband’s office. After settling for so long in one home, she’s lost her sea legs. She mumbles into the night, responding to invisible voices, and Roxanne plasters over her concern with a stony and unyielding face. She learned from the best.

 

     This is not the first time Roxanne has seen the ocean’s unfathomable vastness, but it is the first time she’s seen it from sea level. She remembers being so small that the seatbelts on Dr. Harley’s jets could hardly hold her in place. She’d press herself to the window, peering at glimpses of cobalt from past the clouds. It seemed to go on forever. Sometimes if she was very lucky, she’d catch sight of a tiny island, the tiniest blip in a world of saltwater.

     - How did people get to those islands before planes were invented? Roxanne would ask the window.

     Dr. Harley would take a while to answer, still distracted by the paperwork on their desk. His fountain pen would make a whisking sound across the page, and he’d clear his throat.

     - Necessity is the mother of invention, Roxanne. When early humans left their continental homes, they used rafts and ships to sail the sea.

     - Like Vikings?

     Roxanne thought she heard the ghost of amusement in his voice.

     - Yes Roxanne, exactly like Vikings.

 

     For a moment, Roxanne confuses the roar of the boat’s engine with the jet in her memory. There’s the relentless sound of water crashing against metal, and Dr. Claire moaning in her sleep, and then she’s torn to the present. Her eyes dart to the blipping radar. It’s been fourteen days – not much longer remains.

     Already, the mist of midmorning is beginning to lift. Roxanne pushes up her sunglasses and tightens the bandana wrapped into her hair, briefly feeling how slick the sweat is on her forehead. The Pacific sun pokes its head out with its wet and oppressive heat, and as Roxanne squints into the horizon she can start to see a single towering spire in the middle of the sea.

 

 

     It is the tenth of April, and this means that Jade’s grandfather has been dead for four months and nine days.

     Perhaps a brief rewind is warranted.

     Let’s get some things straight about Jade Harley. She’s more of an observer than a talker, taking the world in with wide, glassy eyes. That world happens to be very small. Determined to make up for the finiteness of her home, Jade starts walking very early. She toddles across the hills with trembling legs, stumbling in the tall grass and being caught by her dog before her knees can land in the mud. He’s tall enough to be her steed. Before she masters the rolling landscape of the island, her grandfather places Jade on Becquerel’s back. An unconventional pony for an unconventional little girl.

     Jade enjoys a stability to her home life which she will never realize she took for granted.

     Every morning, her grandfather’s boots thud heavily down the stairs from the upstairs laboratory. He wakes her up for breakfast in the atrium, and most of the time he helps her carry her little plastic watering cans so she can water her plants. For two hours they stand out in the heavy sun while Jade practices her shooting, and her grandfather pats her on the back and tells her “well done” even if she doesn’t hit anything. Then she has the afternoon to herself while he’s in the temple. Jade always finds something to do. She watches her _Squiddles!_ VHS tapes, or makes soap operas with her dolls, or strums the bass guitar she’s just started playing. In the early evening he’ll return with a felled beast under his arm – black and oily creatures with tusks and horns and unseeing white eyes. Her grandfather tells her that these are sea monsters. He explains the bullet holes in their hides as self-defense – they were rising up out of Triton’s domain, after all. They have a brief dinner on the Persian rug of the foyer, warming themselves up by the fireplace as the island air goes chilly. Dinner is always a light meal, since rations are only delivered once every six months. After supper, she sits on his shoulders and they ride up to the laboratory on the transportalizers, and Jade helps him take the corpses apart. She wears a lab mask much too big for her and thick plastic goggles, and as he scoops out the greasy organs, she helps prepare them for taxidermy. When the sun skims the horizon and the sky bleeds purple, he carries her back to her room and brushes out her hair. Becquerel curls up at the end of the bed, her grandfather switches on the nightlight that projects the Milky Way across her ceiling, and then he goes downstairs to retire in his office. Rinse and repeat. Her grandfather’s other children would be so lucky if they could count on such routine. Then again, Jade does not know her grandfather has other children.

     Four months and nine days ago, that routine fell apart.

     Jade is four years old, traversing the hills with legs that get more confident each day. Becquerel still tries to get her to ride on his back everywhere, and so as she walks cautiously through the grass he sticks to her side and snuffles her cheek with his cold nose.

     Somewhere behind her is a cold metal pistol, its silver engravings glinting in the weeds. Jade got tired of playing with it once it went off suddenly, a loud crack of gunpowder that made her lurch back. She tried to get the ringing in her ears to go away by forming earmuffs with her hands. The barrel smelled bad, but she couldn't find the bullet that came out. Becquerel growled and circled her a few times, licking her face as though she were hurt. For a moment, Jade had forgotten he was there.

     No longer fun, she left the pistol behind. Jade got a strife specibus for her birthday, but she hasn't really gotten the hang of it yet. Eventually her grandpa might find the pistol in the grass and scold her for abandoning it, but she barely recognizes the risk.

     He is exactly where he was when she wandered off, the tea table he set up never quite disappearing from her view at the bottom of the hill. Jade waves at him once her little legs get her up the slope, then stumbles a bit on the hem of her skirt and lands in a kneeling position. Her grandpa does not say anything, does not stand or extend a hand to pull her up. He looks away, his shoulders slumped and his glasses a bit askew on his face. He looks tired.

     Even now, Jade does not remember what it was she said to him, nor her first reaction to the blood turning brown on his lapel.

     No one could accuse Jade Harley of not being a tough cookie, even at four years old. She has her grandfather’s boundless curiosity and her grandmother’s steel resolve – an unbeatable combination which has baked over hard in the Pacific sun.

     At four years old, she drags her grandfather’s body through the grass until her strength is sapped from her. After twenty yards, Becquerel realizes what she’s trying to do and teleports them both to the foyer.

     At four years old, Jade arranges his body so that he leans against the antique sofa, his head slouched against his shoulder. She tries to think of what to do. She wonders how she’s going to eat tonight. Her stomach growls and Becquerel whines and she curls herself up in his fur. He wraps his sleek white body around her, and for the first night she sleeps with her cheek against him.

     At four years old, she heaves his body onto the transportalizer and hauls him to the laboratory. The heels of his boots thunk-thunk-thunk against the steps.

     At four years old, she wears a lab mask much too big for her and thick plastic goggles and splits her grandfather open. She does a haphazard job. A line of uneven stitches goes down his face, and sewing up the hole in his lapel becomes an afterthought. But it’s done, and it’s mounted, and he stands tall again.

     At four years old, Jade Harley pulls her grandfather in front of the roaring fireplace, and his silhouette stretches to the door.

     It hasn’t been so bad since then, if one disregards the nightmares that plague her each night. Jade often wakes in the crack of dawn with cold sweat running down her face, the traces of blue yarn whispering in her periphery. It took two months to build up the courage to collect the doll from outside. Jade could see it from her window – she sat patiently at the tea table, the strands of her hair hiding her button eyes. Should she go outside at all? _Could_ she? Would Becquerel protect her if the doll tried to shoot her, too? Jade wasn’t sure.

     But if you disregard all that, Jade has been adjusting well.

     Becquerel nudged her along with his snout to show her where her grandfather kept the rations. He’s left behind a clipboard of log dates and kilograms of food spent, and Jade keeps the tradition alive. Her handwriting is nowhere as pretty as his. Becquerel shows her where his own food is stored, and never lets her miss a mealtime. He watches her back and keeps her out of harm’s way, yanking her back from staircase ledges and the sharp corners of desks. He sleeps in the atrium and warms his fur while she waters her plants – by herself this time – and at night, he whines and bunts her hair with his paws in what must be his imitation of her grandfather brushing her hair. She switches on her nightlight and runs into bed before the darkness can swallow her whole, and as she watches the blurry Milky Way sprawl across the ceiling, she thinks she can hear her grandfather walking down the steps.

     Jade has never been a big crier. She’s slow to frighten even as an infant; the storms over the sea fail to phase her, as do the clunking robots that churn away to build the Harley’s tower high into the sky. Her grandfather leads by example. He’s unresponsive to tears, simply wipes them away rather than coo and reassure and swaddle, and Jade learns early on that tears won’t accomplish much. When her grandfather dies, she spends the first night huddled on the floor. She cries and cries and cries until all her tears are spent, and after that night it seemed she’d cried them all out for good. For four months and nine days, she does not weep again.

     Where did we leave that bookmark?

     Oh, right. Today is the tenth of April.

     It is a normal day for Jade Harley, Preschool-Aged Feral Child. She wakes up when the gulls start to scream. For minutes she lies awake listening to the ocean beat the shore. When she rolls over and curls her little legs in toward her stomach, Becquerel notices she’s up and bats her feet with one of his paws. He flops over and grunts with protest, and finally she hops out of bed. Her bare feet smack-smack-smack against the floor. He follows her downstairs, tail wagging furiously, until they reach the atrium. The sun streams in through the tall glass windows, and Jade stands on her tip toes to crank on the record player. The needle still rests on the record from last night, and it resumes playing through the overhead speakers.

     It’s around this time that Jade expects someone to tell her what to do. _Make sure the peonies have enough water, Jade. Be sure to practice emptying your captchalogue today. Double-check how many firearms are in your strife specibus. Go and see how many apples are ripe. Don’t come down into office, Jade, I have a lot of work planned for today._ She decides which fuzzy demand to focus on. First she waters the peonies. Then she counts the firearms in her specibus – six. When she goes down into the foyer, she avoids the hidden door to her grandfather’s office, even though he’s standing in front of the fireplace anyway.

 _You thought I was asleep last night, didn’t you?_ her grandfather asks. Jade jumps, fingers curling in at her chest. _You’ll burn the house down if you try stunts like that._

     Stupid! Jade knew he’d find out sooner or later that she tried to stick the blue doll in the fire. In the end, the sparks had gotten too low. The embers wouldn’t take to the polyester.

     “I’m sorry.”

_I thought you knew better than that._

     “Sorry.”

_Be sure that Bec receives his dinner on time. You were nearly late yesterday._

     “Right. Yeah. I know.”

_Are you going outside?_

     “I think so.”

_I hope you’re utilizing your strife specibus. You never know what might show up out there. The island is a dangerous place._

     “Yes. I have six guns capt… captcha… I have six guns.”

_That’ll have to do. Be careful, Jade._

     “I will.”

_I love you, Jade._

     “I love you, too.”

     Jade pulls the front door open and squints in the light. Already the midmorning mist is beginning to lift. The gray wash over the ocean fades away to reveal the brightest sapphire. She stands in the doorway, her hand cupped to form a visor over her eyes, and behind her she begins to hear a low growl in Becquerel’s throat. It startles her – he can materialize so suddenly. She turns to see him pacing in agitation around the foyer, his tail lashing.

     “What’s wrong, Bec?” she whispers.

     Bec bares his teeth, sharp and white, and in the next second he barrels past Jade into the open grass. His fur sparks with chartreuse and yellow, and then he’s over the nearest hill. She stares after him with her mouth ajar.

     “What was that about…?” she murmurs.

     Jade steps out of the threshold, her toes settling in the dewy grass. The breeze blows her hair back. His barks echo, but she can’t spot Becquerel anywhere. She walks out further into the hills, starts to call his name, and before the words can get out of her she spots the hazy shape of a ship on the horizon.

 

 

     It is a very white and very vicious dog that greets the Drs. Lalonde and Claire on the shore of the island.

     The dog is a bright mark against the misty island. When Roxanne finally docks, it is already waiting. The front of the ship crunches against rock, and Dr. Claire stirs from sleep after the dog begins to bark. She slicks her hair back and moves to the front of the boat, her eyes narrow in the light.

     “Tesseract…?” she mumbles. Then she shakes her head, angry at herself. “Jacob didn’t tell me he was bringing a dog with him.”

     Roxanne pushes her sunglasses up into her hair. The dog shifts its weight back and forth, and she sees a vivid flash of neon lightning ripple over his fur. A shiver runs down her spine.

     “I think the dog might have been here first,” she answers.

     Dr. Claire swallows and gazes up at the white tower. It ends in a bright dome stamped with an atom – an ostentatious habit picked up from running a corporation, or a beacon for planes? Either way, it strikes her as terribly unnecessary. In her feverish state, the height of the tower looks ready to topple forward. Dr. Claire shuts her eyes and grips the wall of the boat to steady herself.

     “Well, I can’t imagine there’s much out here for a dog to eat,” she says between labored breaths, “unless it’s wading out into sea every day. Someone’s taking care of it.”

     Roxanne steps onto the front of the hull and hops out, her soles grinding against the rough sand. Up on the hill, the dog snarls and flattens its ears against its head.

     “Let’s see if we can’t tame this puppy.”

     It’s still low tide. Water laps between the marbled rocks along the shore and squelches under Roxanne’s steps. She keeps her shoulders lowered, half-bowing her head in the way she always saw zookeepers do when confronting their more dangerous residents. Roxanne peers at the dog’s paws, determined not to look it in the eyes for fear that it might lunge forward.

     “Hello,” she coos lowly. The dog licks its teeth, and she sees that its gums are a dark and mossy green. “Who’s a good pup?”

     The dog barks. Roxanne flinches at the volume of it – like a crash of thunder in a sealed vacuum.

     “Be careful, Roxy,” Dr. Claire warns. She’s still hidden in the shadow of the boat.

     “God damn it,” she mutters back. “See, this is why I’m a cat person.”

     The wind blows in hard from the north, and the long grass ripples with shades of green. Roxanne grits her teeth and walks further uphill, bowing her head all the while. What always used to work when Tesseract was young? He was an excitable puppy, too big for his age, a forty-pound beast more polar bear than dog. Think, Roxanne, think.

     She whistles under her breath, a low-pitched tune, and the dog’s ears twitch. It starts to walk off, then paces back to where it was. There’s not much space between them now. Roxanne stretches her hands away from her sides and begins to whisper.

     “I’m your friend,” she says. “I know your master. Do you understand? We aren’t here to hurt anyone.”

     Roxanne risks a look into the dog’s face. Its cheeks are a wispy white, the fur so thick around its eyes that she can’t even see them. When they make eye contact – or at least, when she thinks they do – the dog snarls. Its lips pull back from its teeth, and there’s a neon burst of green that shocks Roxanne to the core and rips the breath out of her. They’re at the top of a mountain, in the thick of a rainforest, within the belly of an underwater cavern, and then they’re back on the beach.

     “Jesus!” Dr. Claire shouts. “Roxanne, you disappeared!”

     Roxanne’s breath rattles in her lungs. Her body feels like it’s leaking outside the lines, and she staggers to regain her stance. The dog’s muzzle is snaked in bright yellow crackles.

     “Alice,” she says. She hears the tears in her own voice. “This dog is not normal.”

     “No shit! I think I have an idea. Stay put, and try not to get rocketed through a wormhole.”

     “Roger that.”

     Dr. Claire disappears into the back of the boat. She rummages through one of the trunks they’ve brought along, and Roxanne hears the sound of fabric being beaten out.

     Alice swallows hard and lowers herself out of the boat, taking each step delicately. She wavers on her feet, and Roxanne grabs her bicep to hold her upright. There’s something under her arm.

     “What is that?” Roxanne whispers.

     “Jacob left his jacket behind,” replies Alice. “The one he got in Cairo. It was his favorite – I thought he might want it.” She pushes her hair back, the streaks of gray glinting in the sun. “Now, give me a turn with the mutt.”

     Dr. Claire does not adopt a zookeeper pose. She straightens her shoulders and looks at the dog down the length of her nose, and with one hand she shoves the jacket forward in offering.

     The snarl in its throat subsides to a grumble, and it inches forward to investigate. It sticks its nose into the folds of the leather jacket, sniffing furiously, and after a few seconds it rips the whole thing out of Dr. Claire’s hand. She barely gasps. Again it buries its head in the arm creases of the jacket, kneading its paws into the fabric in a way that reminds Roxanne of her cat, Jaspers. Finally, it begins to whine. Its ears swivel to the front, its lips pull forward again, and its tail stops lashing.

     “Satisfied?” she asks flatly.

     The dog almost appears to understand. It picks the jacket up in its mouth and turns back to the tower. Then it takes a few steps and looks back over at them. It’s a silent request to follow. Roxanne exhales and wipes the sweat from her cheeks. Her palms feel grubby with heat.

     “Nice work.”

     Neither of them think to ask whether the other is ready. _Are you okay? Do you feel prepared?_ What would there be to say? Neither is ready, and neither is okay.

     Roxanne links her arm with Dr. Claire’s, and together they trudge up the hill to Dr. Harley’s house.

 

 

     It is just about time for Jade Harley to start panicking.

     She stood outside the house and watched the ship dock, crouching low and hiding herself half behind the doorframe. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing her grandfather to tell her something, _anything_ that would make her less afraid. Food rations came from crates that fell from the sky, which means that this isn’t a delivery. He had no explanation. His figure loomed silent in front of the fireplace, stiff and leathery. Jade bit her bottom lip hard and closed the door behind her.

     There’s nowhere to go. She isn’t allowed in the temple, so that’s out of the question. She knows how to access her grandfather’s hidden office, but not how to get out. The countless floors from the atrium to her room are wide and empty – nowhere to hide in any of them. In the end, she ran up the stairs to the nearest transportalizer and latched herself up in her bedroom.

     From her window, she can see two little figures working their way up the island’s hills. She can see that they’re linked together from how one of them sways and staggers, the other one pulling them upright. Becquerel trots ahead in front of them. Something is in his mouth, but Jade can’t see what.

     If Becquerel is letting them into the house, then they can’t be _bad_ , can they? Oh – but they’re _adults_! Jade breaks out in a nervous chill. Adults try to take children away when they’re alone. Jade knows this from watching the Christmas special of _Squiddles!_ ; when Peachberry Pete was tragically revealed to be homeless, Daisy and Maisy the seahorses adopted him and took him to live in Grapefruit Gulf. _Everyone_ knows Peachberry Pete stopped being a series regular after that!

     Jade knows enough to know that wherever that boat came from is far beyond her realm of understanding. Sometimes she forgets that there is a world beyond this ocean – that somewhere there are houses with trees and people and maybe even cars, if her imagination gets carried enough away. Maybe they speak another language. Maybe they’ll come in and take her away on that boat and she’ll have to live somewhere where she can’t understand anyone. Somewhere like France, or Ecuador, or Louisiana.

     She slouches under the window frame and clasps her hands to her mouth. For the first time in four months and nine days, she almost feels the tears coming. Jade blinks them back hard and folds her legs up to her chest.

     It’s impossible to stay up here forever. She’ll need to eat sooner or later, and get water, and let Bec in for meals. Jade wonders for how long she’ll be able to hide. If she stays low and fast and unassuming, maybe they’ll give up and sail away.

     Jade pops her head up to look out the window again. None of them can be seen anymore – not the first figure, not their stumbling companion, not even Bec. Jade gets on her hands and knees and crawls toward her bed. It’s too high up to hear the front door close. They could be looking for her already, and she wouldn’t even know it. She pulls the sheets up over her head and curls underneath the blankets.

     If she falls asleep, maybe the White Queen will have an answer. She’ll scoop her up in her ivory arms and whisper some wisdom and hold her to her chest while they look over the Prospitian skyline. Jade can feel it now – the warm Skaialight coasting over the tips of the cathedrals. But if she goes to sleep, they might catch her. She could wake up and already be halfway to Grapefruit Gulf. Jade has no idea what to do.

     Jade tugs the sheets tightly around her and makes herself small.

 

 

     It proves rather difficult to get inside.

     The front door of Dr. Harley’s tower almost feels like it’s made of concrete. Roxanne presses her full weight against the atom emblem imprinted in the center. She pushes and pushes, and when nothing happens, she kicks her boot against the door and tugs on the handle until she’s almost perpendicular to it.

     Dr. Claire leans against the outside wall and finds that the metal is surprisingly cool. He must have used bots to build this spire so high – they’re the only reason Skaianet was able to put up so many laboratories in so few years. She counts the seconds between her inhales and exhales. It’s hard to regulate her breathing now that they’ve reached the top of the slope, and now Dr. Claire is unsure what she is and isn’t hallucinating.

     That bizarre dog – she didn’t imagine it, did she? It bounded up to the door and phased itself through, crackling green and yellow. And then it was gone. She isn’t out of her mind, is she? If Roxanne saw it the same way she did, then she didn’t react. She just pursed her lips and threw her weight against the door.

     “Damn it!” Roxanne spits.

     She puts her hands on her hips, breathing heavily. Dr. Claire has no words of encouragement at the ready. Roxanne wipes her arm across her forehead, and from where she stands Dr. Claire can smell how sweaty she is. Not that she’s much better – week-long fever and whatnot.

     Dr. Claire hangs her head, the grass going fuzzy in her vision. When her eyes are almost closed, she hears Roxanne yelp and curse. Her head snaps to attention. Dr. Claire sees that the front door has, somehow or other, gone green. It pulses electrically, and as Roxanne lifts her hand to touch the surface, crackles of static lick at her fingertips. She passes her hand fully through and turns to give Dr. Claire a wide, bright smile.

     Alice shakes her head. “This is insane.”

     “As insane as ectobiology?”

     “Maybe more so.”

     Roxanne grabs Dr. Claire’s arm, and they shudder as a cold wash of electricity pours over their cells. Behind them, the door sputters back to its original gray.

     A hallway leads into the dark. They catch a glimpse of the mysterious dog padding away, its claws clicking against the stone tile, and then it disappears.

     Shade shields them from the Pacific sun. Everything is quiet and dark and dusty, and the two women take a moment to collect their bearings. For Dr. Claire, this is a little harder. She staggers back against the wall and keeps her weight against the wallpaper. It smells like mothballs and aging paper – the same scent that permeates Harley Manor’s more antique-riddled corridors. There’s a brief, fleeting moment where she’s certain she must be back at home, and she starts to call out for Jude to come downstairs… and then she hears a quiet squeak come out of Roxanne’s throat. The illusion falls apart.

     “Dad…?” she whispers. It’s almost silent, like no one else was meant to hear.

     Dr. Claire feels cold. She follows Roxanne’s line of sight, and her heart seizes up when she sees the dark silhouette of her husband. Dr. Harley stands in front of the dying fire, and the red embers trace his outline. The lenses of his glasses glint orange. Roxanne takes a tentative step forward.

     “Dr. Harley, was that your dog out there? I think… did he let us inside?”

     A sudden wave of lucidity takes hold of Alice. She stands up straight and strides over to Roxanne, resting her hand on her shoulder.

     “Jacob,” she barks. “I hope you have a good explanation for this. Roxy has been losing sleep wondering why you weren’t responding. Your _children_ have asked me incessantly whether you’d call.” Roxanne tenses under her hand. “Do you have anything to say to us, Jacob? It’s only taken two _weeks_ to come after you.”

     Roxanne realizes that Dr. Harley is awfully still. His boots always stay firmly on the ground. An unmovable object minus the unstoppable force. But this is not normal. She inches slowly forward, and Dr. Claire’s hand falls from its resting spot.

     Her heart pounds in her chest. It’s not excitement, or anxiety, or even fear – just a horrible, oily dread that burns like a grease fire in her gut. Roxanne’s fingers tremble. She edges closer to the looming Dr. Harley, as dark and enigmatic and infinitely tall as he always was, and stretches her hand out to rest it on his lapel.

     The weight of her touch pushes him back, and the block of wood Dr. Harley’s body is mounted upon wobbles.

     The iron mass of her disappointment crashes down on Roxanne all at once. All the hope that had built up high inside her lungs, all the wishing and wanting for her guardian to be alive and well deflates and collapses and sticks, tar-like, to her insides. He’s dead.

     Roxanne backs away, her hands pressed to her face. If she squeezes her eyes hard enough shut, maybe the blobs of iridescent color will wash out the sight of him. She won’t see the crooked line of his mouth, or the uneven scrawl of stitches down the side of his face. She stumbles far enough back to bump into Dr. Claire, and when their shoulders brush she feels the tears escape. They run down her face fast and hot, and the air whistles between her teeth as she tries to suppress the volume of her devastation.

     “He-he’s, he’s actually… all this time he’s been….” Roxanne gasps. Her tears pump the air out of her.

     Dr. Claire is stony beside her. Her fists clench and unclench.

     “Roxanne,” she says coolly. It chills her how soft and undisturbed her tone is. “Tell me something. In all your time of producing paradox clones, did you find the products unusual in any way?”

     She wipes her face dry, her chest still heaving. “What?”

     “I remember the first time Jacob took me to the inner laboratories at Skaianet. There were great glass vials, so thick they distorted the things inside like funhouse mirrors. We sat side by side and I watched him produce… well, I don’t know what you’d call them. Puppies, I suppose. They were clones of his childhood dog. Prototypes as he worked his way up towards more sophisticated creatures. Maybe it’s where that hellhound outside came from. Maybe he cloned a dog with the properties of a transportalizer. Tesseract was one of the originals. A little mutated – Jacob said maybe he’d been in the vial too long. ‘Overcooked,’ he called it.”

     An ember in the fireplace pops.

     “Within a week they were almost fully grown. Each generation of clones had accelerated growth. They matured faster than they were meant to. Even then, something about it seemed wrong. I felt he was playing God. But you know… you really can’t sway him once he thinks he’s doing the right thing.”

     Roxanne already feels exhausted. Her legs wobble for the first time, sapped from sailing for two weeks straight. “What’s your point?”

     “I wonder….” Dr. Claire purses her lips. She stares at her husband’s stiff corpse, and not a trace of emotion crosses her face. “I wonder how fast a human would mature, given how his technology has chugged along.”

     “The kid’s only four, Alice.”

     She won’t tear her eyes from Dr. Harley. “Oh, I know.”

     “You don’t think she’s responsible for this. You can’t actually be convinced that –”

     “Roxanne, don’t be ignorant. Unless there’s a team of murderous scientists here that Jacob didn’t mention, the only lifeforms on this island are a dog and that little girl. Who do you think did _this_ to my husband?” she shouts, gesticulating to the taxidermied Dr. Harley. “If a four-year-old can stuff and mount the body of a grown adult, what else is it capable of? Roxanne. That child isn’t normal. It wasn’t born like us, and it sure as hell wasn’t raised like us.”

     “Alice, _Rose_ is the same as that child! You _know_ her, and we both know she isn’t like that.”

     “Rose started speaking at nine months, Roxanne. She walked not long after that.”

     Roxanne’s hands fly into her hair, and she takes two tufts of them in exasperation. “Alice, some children just start doing that shit early!”

     “Come back to me with that argument when your daughter starts skinning and tanning humans.”

     The bile rises in Roxanne’s throat. A brief nausea bubbles in her stomach, and she thinks she might vomit, but then she swallows and the feeling ebbs.

     “What do we do, then?”

     Alice walks past Roxanne and faces Dr. Harley directly. She stares at him only briefly, examining the details of his face as though refreshing her memory. She smooths out the wrinkles in his coat, straightens his lapel and readjusts his pith helmet, then she slips off his wedding band and tucks it into her back pocket.

     “We go looking for it.”

 

 

     It isn’t an hour later that Jade can tell the two women are approaching.

     Bec phased through the hatch in the floor, bounding across the room and landing with a plop in the center of her bed. He paced in a circle and lay down, and when Jade poked her head out from under the sheets, she saw that he was lying with a faded, brown leather jacket crumpled up between his paws.

     “What do you have?” she asked.

     Jade reached out and tried to grab the sleeve, but Becquerel gave a warning snap and crackled green. He usually only does that when she tries to work the bullets out from between his teeth during fetch. No dice, then.

     “Where’s those two people, Bec?” Jade asked. “Did you let them in the house?” She lowered herself flush to the comforter, whispering almost into his face. But he only yawned, revealing a bright green tongue and smelly dog breath. Jade blew a raspberry and sat up straight.

 

     Her stomach growls. Jade can’t remember how many hours it’s been since she had breakfast. She gets out of bed and tiptoes down the steps to the door in the floor. She lowers herself to the ground and presses her ear to the door. There are voices coming from below! Two women’s voices – definitely adults. Jade bites her lip. 

     If she stays small and fast and unassuming, she can do it. Jade peers back over her shoulder, but Bec is busy rolling in the scent of his new clothes. She unlocks the hatch and leaps down the concrete steps to the antechamber. Below is the transportalizer to the atrium, and the source of the women’s low tones. They’re coming up now – nowhere to go but up, then. Jade gets on all fours and runs up the stairs to the laboratory. Her grubby hands slip on the lock, but she gets it undone and crawls up into the mess.

     By now, the laboratory is less of a lab and more of an attic. The excess of his treasures are piled up in here – sarcophagi and fenestrated windows and clanking suits of armor. Jade must be very careful not to disturb the antiques, or else the sound will alert the women to her presence. This shouldn’t be hard. Just stay quiet while they search her room, then catch the transportalizer to the atrium while they’re distracted. Flawless, right? Jade thinks so.

     She curls herself up between two Eclectica Girls and listens through the floor.

     “… has got to be up here,” Jade hears. This woman’s voice sounds like the wicked stepmother in one of her movies. “Check it out, Roxanne. Looks like a bedroom. If I were a toddler facing home invasion, where would I go?”

     “You’re getting carried away, Alice,” pipes a second voice. It’s friendlier, but tinged with the same kind of silent worry that always poked through Jade’s grandfather’s voice. “She’s going to be afraid of us. You’ll see. Try not to sound like a supervillain when we find her.”

     Their voices become muffled, and Jade hears their shoes clunking up the stairs to her bedroom. Bec gives a stifled bark, so Jade knows they’ve entered the room completely. Success! Jade throws the lab door open and pulls the folds of her skirt up high so she won’t trip down the stairs. Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat – she pitters all the way down to the ivory transportalizer and almost falls face-first onto it. Dark green eats her up and presses down on her skin, and then Jade is in the atrium. Mission accomplished!

     The music record is still playing. The jazzy trumpet is low and lilting, echoing off of the glass. There’s so much open space. Though the atrium has always made her feel safe, Jade is now aware that she’s incredibly vulnerable. She scampers to one of the tables that holds her plants, yanking an orange off the stem and disappearing underneath.

     Two birds with one stone. Now she’s hidden _and_ has food. The underside of this table smells like wet dirt. It’s held up by terracotta pots that her grandfather stacked up, and the scent of them is calming and earthy. Jade digs her sharp little fingernails into the skin of the orange, ripping it open sloppily. It annoys her how badly her hands keep shaking. If she knew the phrase “adrenaline rush,” she might use it to describe how she feels right now.

     This orange is too small. It’s almost sour – not as ripe as the others. Jade eats it anyway, and it inflames the soreness of her hunger. If her grandfather were here, they might have mackerel for lunch. They’d sit in the wrought iron chairs under the hanging pots of hydrangeas and drink something sweet and bubbly like lemonade or seltzer water. Jade pounds the bottom of her palm against her temple. Stop thinking about what-ifs, Jade! Your grandfather is not here to make you mackerel, gosh dang it!

     Jade huddles herself smaller under the table. The sound of her chewing is loud enough to echo under the table, so she tries to take smaller bites. Then the orange is all devoured, and there’s nothing left but the spiraling skin. She doesn’t feel any better. Jade thinks of where to put it and decides to shove it in her pocket.

     The tables are very low to the ground. Jade can barely see what’s going on out in the atrium, so she lies flat on her stomach and rests her chin on her folded arms. She can see everything much better this way. Now if someone comes looking, she’ll spot them before they spot her. A gnat flies past her face, and she swats it away.

     Now all she has to do is wait for those women to get tired and leave. She knows this from experience. Jade used to be very good at hide-and-seek, though you can hardly call it hide-and-seek if the other person doesn’t know you’re playing. She would find a great stuffed bear or a mound of medieval shields to hide behind, and her grandfather’s boots would pass by, and she’d snicker as he called out for her, but he’d never actually find her. He’d keep walking to the next corridor, and eventually she’d poke her head out and the roles of the game would be reversed. She’d find him preoccupied with a fenestrated window, his work glasses magnifying the tiny wires and screws of the devices, and he’d look briefly up at her in the doorway before returning his focus to his work.

     - Ah, there you are, he’d say. Don’t run off like that.

     - Sorry.

     Jade can’t imagine that this will be much different. Whatever these women want, they’ll quit when they realize they can’t find her. She curls her legs up close to warm herself under the shady table. For a while her heart thumps as she anticipates the women’s materialization, but then her attention span yields and she finds her eyes drooping closed. The gulls outside keep screaming.

     Just have to wait until the women leave. Just have to wait.

 

 

     It is not a proficient search party that Dr. Claire is leading.

     They take the transportalizer all the way to the top of the tower. Something has to be in those eyesores, she insisted, and she _did_ turn out to be correct. Towards the pinnacle of the spire, Roxanne and Alice find a little girl’s bedroom. They don’t, however, get much of an opportunity to scour it. They may have convinced the dog that they aren’t imminent threats, but this thing is clearly a protective little devil. Roxanne tries to look under the bed, but the dog pulls its lips back and gives a low grumble. There’s a trunk next to the window. Dr. Claire opens it, but there’s nothing inside but magic eight balls and stuffed animals.

     “It’s peaceful in here,” Roxanne says. There’s a trace of a smile on her face. She edges away from the dog and looks up at the ceiling. “Reminds me of Rose’s room. I wonder if I should put flowers in there when we get back.”

     Dr. Claire begrudgingly agrees. It’s a cute, colorful, typical room – actually, it reminds her more of Joey’s. All the colorful toys and games, the cartoon posters and the patterned bedsheets. Alice did most of the decorating for Joanne’s bedroom. She painted it herself, and helped her daughter tape up the posters that were too high up for Joey to reach. Is this Dr. Harley’s imitation of what he thought a girl’s room should look like? Her heart hurts.

     “Did you hear something?” Roxanne asks suddenly. She glances to the dog to see if it’s having a similar reaction, but it’s flopped over in the blankets. “I thought I heard….”

     “Probably the water. The sky is getting gray out there.”

     A breeze wafts in through the open window, salty and clean.

     “She isn’t in here,” Dr. Claire sighs. “I saw more stairs when we came in. Let’s check out what’s up there.”

 

     The laboratory might shock anyone on Earth besides these two women. When Roxanne pokes her head into the orb at the top of the tower, she rolls her eyes. More of the same old junk that he littered his house with back in Washington. Where does he keep getting this stuff?

     The Drs. poke around in the antiques, peering past peeling posters and opening ancient coffins for signs of life. They agree that no toddler would be able to hide up here without knocking everything over. Roxanne kicks the disembodied gauntlet of a knight’s armor and runs her fingers through her hair.

     “Well, if she’s not up here then we’ll have to comb our way back down,” she sighs.

     Dr. Claire’s chest heaves. “I’m not going down all those stairs again. She can’t be in any of the empty rooms, there’s nothing to hide under. We must have missed a spot.” She rubs her chin. “We’ll go back to the greenhouse, then work our way through the rooms with the lights. There’s plenty of hallways down there that she could be squirreled away in.”

     Roxanne nods. “Sure you don’t want to take a rest?”

     Dr. Claire laughs. “Roxy, you know I never rest.”

 

     They go one after the other on the transportalizer, elegant as one can be while having their atoms picked apart and rearranged somewhere else. Skaianet is scattered with these pads – no novelty for the doctors. The two women step into the atrium, which has gone dull and desaturated with the tropical storm rolling in from the west.

     It’s eerie in here. The leaves stand perfectly still, looking washed out in the light. Roxanne traces her fingers along a marbled column. Dr. Claire continues on ahead, and Roxanne sees that her focus is on the old record player in the front of the room.

     “This was from the first house I lived in with Joey,” she whispers. Her hand flits about the crank like she thinks it’ll snap off at the slightest touch. “I brought it with me when we moved into the Hauntswitch house. And then, well, you know… it was an obsolete old thing, but Jacob didn’t want me to toss it. He said it reminded him of his childhood home. I was wondering what he did with it.”

     She lifts her head and blinks. Roxanne realizes that the music is still playing from the spinning record – it’s crackly and soft, but it reverberates through the overhead speakers. Dr. Claire has a dreamy look on her face, all the tense muscles in her face relaxing.

     “I remember this album! God, I used to listen to it all the time. It was my motivational music when I was still writing my thesis.” A tinny trumpet whistles through the speakers, and Dr. Claire taps her foot against the shining tile.

     “I guess the kid likes it, too.”

     The corners of Dr. Claire’s mouth twitch. “I suppose so.”

     Roxanne walks over to an overflowing table of vegetation. Long springs of onions and asparagus shoot from countless pots all arranged tightly together. It almost makes her wish that she didn’t pay someone else to do her gardening. Roxanne brushes away a long, drooping vine from a pot of turnips and sees that there’s a sticker label on the table’s ledge. It’s written in two different handwritings. The first five letters are written in the thin and angular cursive of Dr. Harley, and the rest are scrawled in a toddler’s clumsy, misshapen script. He was helping her practice her writing, then. Roxanne’s chest aches. The little girl finished their label with an uneven star. _Vegetables!_ _☆_

     This child might be morbidly skilled at taxidermy, but this is where the oddity stops. She isn’t any different from Rose, she isn’t even different from Jude or Joey when they were her age. A child is a child. Roxanne’s chest floods with the warm lavender that can only be called maternal instinct and turns back to Dr. Claire, her determination multiplied exponentially to find this girl.

     And then the tip of her boot brushes something soft and solid, and Roxanne hears the quietest of gasps.

     There’s a moment where everything else goes quiet. The muscles in her legs seize up, and as the scrambling of tiny hands and feet scratches under the table, she throws herself down on the floor. Dr. Claire returns from her daydream.

     “Roxanne!” she exclaims – like she’d forgotten she was there. “What is it?”

     Roxanne lies against the freezing tile. With her cheek against the top of her hand, she’s able to meet the terrified stare of a little girl with bright green eyes.

     “Alice,” she whispers, “I found her.”

 

 

     It is six thirty in the evening, and the dance studio is empty. Empty, that is, except for Joey Claire.

     Joey felt the tears push against her ribs for the full three hours of her ballet class. She doesn’t know what caused it. Maybe it was the back of her instructor’s hair in the mirror that she thought – for a fleeting second – might be her mother’s. Maybe it was the scent of the girl next to her, whose boyfriend’s cologne always permeated her clothes and made her smell so much like the home office of Joey’s father. The pressure grew more and more insistent until she was sure she would have to excuse herself, but then the clock hit six and they were free to go. Joey made a show of packing up her duffle bag painfully slowly until, one by one, everyone else filtered out. The instructor might have asked her if she was feeling all right, but Joey just hung her head and nodded. Then she left, too, and Joey was alone.

     Joey has not heard from her mother in close to three weeks. And her father, _well_.

     Sometimes Joey forgets how special her childhood was. She forgets that not everyone was toted along to expeditions in Morocco and Tibet at only five years old, not even the bougie white kids that’ve populated every private school she’s ever attended. She’s fortunate. Not everyone can say they rode on the back of an ostrich while their mother fretted behind the fence and their stepfather took pictures on a clunky Polaroid. Joey’s life has slowed since her early childhood. She’s stayed in one home, with one family, one dog, and only two or three schools. When she moved out and found a roommate in Seattle, she could count on her mom and her little brother to help her move in. For a while, she convinced herself that it would stay this way. Stupid. No one can keep the famous Dr. Harley tied to one spot, not even a house in the suburbs with a wife and 2.5 kids. Why did Joey think she could hold him down forever?

     Joey tried very hard to get her mom to explain herself before she left. Months went by without word from Dad. Three months and sixteen days, to be precise. Not a letter, not a call, not anything. Then Dr. Claire started packing her trunks, and Roxanne passed in and out of the house hissing into her phone. Voicemails were left from sober-voiced colleagues at Skaianet, blankly asking Alice Claire to get in touch soon. Joey sat on the back steps to the kitchen and watched her mother tie her hair back in the way she only ever did when they were about to embark on another jet ride across the Atlantic.

     - Where are you going with all of that? Joey asked.

     - Roxy and I are meeting one of my old students in Samoa. She’s in the middle of a field study that she thinks we’d be interested in.

     Joey didn’t have to try to hear the lie in her voice. Her mother always sucked at lying. She folded her arms on top of her knees and rested her chin on top of them.

     - This has to do with Dad, doesn’t it? she mumbled.

     Across the room, her mother paused. Then she gave a thin and artificial smile. The same she’d always give when Joey asked where her father was. The light coming in from the kitchen window glinted off of her wedding band and reflected itself on the marble countertop.

     - We won’t be gone more than a month. Once you’re back in school, you’ll hardly miss us.

     Yeah, sure. Her dad wasn’t supposed to be gone for four years, either.

     Secrets are being kept, of that much she’s certain. It has always smarted to be the one left out of the great conspiracy, but perhaps it is simply too hard to blame them. Is it worse to have secrets hidden from you, or to hear the truth when it’s too impossible to believe? After all, as Joey has known for a long time, there are some things you must never, ever tell anyone.

     Back at school, Joey would bite her nails and twist her hair until it became riddled with split ends. She’d imagine the worst scenario – her dad’s body floating in the middle of the ocean, a private jet crashed on a deserted island. So she took on more classes and more clubs and more hours at work to fill the time. Missing homework because she was at work, missing work because she fell asleep getting her clothes on, missing calls from Jude because she was making up late papers, missing sleep because she stayed up on the phone with Jude, trying not to cry into the receiver. Her plans of double majoring are quickly crumbling apart. If she misses another assignment, or if she fails another exam, she’ll be dropped from the prevet program. If she gets dropped from the prevet program, she’ll lose the internship at the emergency animal hospital. This isn’t the way she wanted her senior year to go.

     Spring break has come and gone, and there’s no excuse to drive home. If she did, Joey would find the house empty. Her mother is gone. Her brother is at university. Even Roxy has fled the coop. What could she do? Go down to Rainbow Run and hang out with the housesitter who’s taking care of Rose?

     By now, it’s ten o’clock where Jude is. He’s coming back from his night class, or setting up D&D with his friends, or sifting through his metric ton of unread emails with the nonchalance of a freshman. She could call him right now if she wanted. She _does_ want to. She wants to hear a familiar voice, to hear the laughter on the other line. But then again, she’s been the one to call him for their past three conversations. She doesn’t want to make herself a nuisance. Joey leans her head back against the glass and wonders when she became the sensitive sibling.

     It is seven in the evening, and the violent orange light that poured in through the studio windows has been overtaken with blue. It saturates everything, making it all look eerily neon. A seagull croons outside. Joey draws her legs up to her chest, and the soles of her slippers hiss along the floorboards. She was supposed to bring her pointe shoes to class today, but left them in her apartment. A classmate had an extra pair in her backpack, which was the only reason Joey wasn’t sent home. It’s your senior year, the instructor said. I’d expect more common sense from you.

     She tries to think of what it is that she wants. To be home, to be with her parents? To lie in her childhood bed and watch the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling? To watch the leaves turn yellow in Hauntswitch and come downstairs to see her father in his office? Yes and no. She doesn’t actually want to be home. She likes the independence and the autonomy and the responsibility of living out here. What she _wants_ is the knowledge that they’ll be home if she needs them.

     Joey watches her reflection turn blue and black on the opposite side of the room, and all at once the tears start coming. They’re fast and hot and itch as they run off her chin, and Joey does not move her hand to wipe them away.

 

 

     It takes a while just to get Jade out from under the table.

     Dr. Claire sits on a table ledge and watches Roxanne flatten herself against the floor. Chronic problems with the knees and all – you know how it is. Dr. Claire can see the slightest shadow of the little girl – maybe the tips of her fingers if she squints hard enough – but she’s tucked safely out of sight and reach. By now, Roxanne looks less like she’s searching for something under the fridge and more like she’s decided to have a midnight spasm of despair on the kitchen floor. She lies with her cheek against her arm, speaking lowly to the invisible Jade.

     Jade’s eyes keep darting to the transportalizer across the room, like she’s planning to launch out and run on all fours to its surface. Roxanne thinks her hair looks a little tangled.

     “Hello there,” she coos. She tries to take on the voice she always used for Rose when she was a baby. Come to think of it, it’s also the voice she uses for Jaspers. “Is your name Jade?”

     Jade bites down hard on her bottom lip. She looks a bit like Jude, Roxanne observes.

     “My name is Roxy. We met your puppy on the beach. Does he have a name?”

     Jade makes a small sound and pushes her circular glasses up her nose. She opens her mouth twice, but nothing comes out. When she finally finds her voice, she stutters something that sounds like “Beckrel.”

     “Beckrel? Is that your doggy’s name?”

     She shakes her head. “Becquerel.”

     “Becquerel! Isn’t that a sweet name! He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

     It’s not good enough to just wrangle her out from under the table – with that dog around, they won’t get very far. Jade will have to willingly part with the tower if they want to take her home. She seems to see right through her transparent attempts to be unthreatening, though. Her eyes narrow in that blatantly childish brand of suspicion. Dr. Harley didn’t raise a fool. This girl knows strangers of dubious intent when she sees them. Roxanne reminds herself that she is a home intruder. This kid has probably never met another human besides Dr. Harley.

     “This is a very pretty garden you have,” Roxanne tries. “Did you plant these all yourself? It must take a lot of work. I bet you’re very talented.”

     Jade curls her fingers up into tiny fists. Roxanne notices that the dirt which filters down underneath the table is starting to splotch her face.

      “You must be wondering why we’re here.”

     Farther back, Dr. Claire uncrosses and recrosses her ankles. She makes a small sound in her throat – a _don’t-forget-that-this-is-just-a-kid-Roxanne_ sound.

     “You probably don’t get visitors out here very often. I’m sorry if we frightened you, coming up here like this. But Becquerel knows we aren’t scary. He let us in through the front door.”

     This seems to make Jade reconsider. She chews the inside of her mouth and eyes a rough patch of tile on the floor. She fidgets a bit, and then she looks Roxanne in the eye.

     “Did she try to hurt you?”

     Roxanne looks over her shoulder at Dr. Claire, who returns the gesture with a shrug of her shoulders. A creeping chill finds its way into the base of Roxanne’s spine.

     “Who are you talking about, Jade?”

     This agitates Jade more. She squirms in her huddled position. “The girl in the front room! The blue girl.”

     Dr. Claire pushes her bangs back. With the horror that waited for them in front of the fireplace, she hadn’t paid attention to the figures on the couches. Human-deer chimera with military jackets, mummies with Napoleonic hats – all oddities Jacob had picked up from back alley markets and bought for the humor of them. Alice always thought they were morbid. If he had to pick one collection to sweep away from Hauntswitch, she supposes this isn’t the worst choice. Now that she thinks of it, there _was_ a doll squeezed between the stitched-together monsters. Plain button eyes, stringy blue yarn for hair.

     “The blue girl,” Dr. Claire pipes up. “Are you talking about your doll, Jade?”

     Jade scrunches her eyebrows together at the new voice. “No!” she barks, “She isn’t mine.”

     Roxanne narrows her eyes. “Why do you think she would hurt us?”

     “Because she hurt Grandpa.”

     Dr. Claire shudders from the cold that she feels in her shoulders. Again, the two doctors exchange a look.

     “Jade,” Roxanne says lowly. She puts on her best mom voice, like whenever Rose is convinced that an Elder God is making a nest in the scarves under her bed. “Can you tell me what happened to your grandfather?”

     She makes a face like she might cry, then pushes her glasses up her nose and steels her expression.

     “She shot him.”

     Dr. Claire bites down hard on her lip. Though she can’t see Jade from where she stands, she can hear the quivering of fear in her voice.

     “And how did that happen, Jade? How do you know?” Roxanne presses.

     “We were outside. I left them alone, and then when I came back he was bleeding right here.” Jade jabs her little finger insistently into the side of her chest. Roxanne feels her muscles lock up. “She was the only one with him. I tried to get rid of her, but Grandpa said not to.”

     Slowly, Roxanne pulls herself upright so that she’s kneeling in front of the table. The devastation that sinks into her is a quieter type than actually _seeing_ Dr. Harley’s corpse. It’s subtle and shadowy and drapes itself around her shoulders, and for a moment all she feels is a floating blankness. She doesn’t look back at Alice, doesn’t even look at Jade. She’s sealed off by the single, piercing, horrible realization that Dr. Harley has killed himself. He left his family without a sendoff, took this girl to be shut off from society, and shot himself before she could escape. Roxanne thinks she might vomit.

     Behind her, Dr. Claire feels her shoulders slacken. The suspicion and the anger and the disgust all evaporates, leaving behind only sadness. She looks back on her last interactions with her husband – cursive letters plastered with stamps and speckled with old, affectionate names. He seemed normal. He seemed the same as always – businesslike and methodical. Updates on translation attempts, his findings in the temple, and very rarely, how little Jade was getting along. The isolation and the silence of the Pacific island didn’t seem to bother him. He found it meditative and relaxing to hear his own thoughts and be free of the movement of society. Was he lying the entire time? Did he tell no one he was depressed? Jacob always seemed so unstoppable – always looking forward to the next day, the next flight out of country, the next artifact to discover. What could have possibly changed about him in this place? Did he just not care for his children enough not to shoot himself in the middle of the ocean? To think her husband capable of such cruelty makes Dr. Claire feel ill.

     She pushes herself off the table ledge and lowers herself gently beside Roxanne, her knees complaining, and stoops to look at Jade. She looks like a tough kid – a solid expression of determination that looks so much like Joey whenever Jacob was leading her through a particularly rough patch of jungle. But she’s still so small and fragile, the chubbiness of her cheeks already fading from what must be months of having to feed herself. Dr. Claire feels a rush of warm, melancholy affection. It isn’t maternal, but maybe something similar.

     “Jade, do you know who I am?” she asks.

     Jade gives another suspicious glare and shakes her head.

     “I’m your grandma,” Dr. Claire whispers. She watches the skepticism flash across Jade’s face, the surprise and then the disbelief. “I’ve been away for a very long time, studying Egyptian princesses and stealing back gold from grave robbers. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to arrive! I’ve taken many planes and trains and ships to find you. I’ve asked everyone wherever I go where I could find you. But I’m finally here. I’m here to take you home.”

     Jade shoves her hair out from her eyes. “Where is that?”

     “Away from here. The world is huge, Jade. Bigger than this tower, and bigger than this island. Your grandfather loved adventures more than almost anything. I think he’d want you to go on some of your own.”

     “We know your grandpa wouldn’t want you to be alone,” Roxanne adds. “The world out there still has flowers and vegetables and puppy dogs, Jade. We even live near the beach – you can see the ocean whenever you like. I promise you’ll love it.”

     Jade’s glance darts between the two women, weighing her options. She studies Dr. Claire’s face especially hard, a visual polygraph test.

     “He’s got pictures of you, in his office,” Jade says. “In big boxes. You and him and lots of other people. Are you really married?”

     Alice doubts that Jade knows what this means, but her eyes glaze over with tears anyway and she responds with a pained nod. This satisfies Jade. The doubt lifts a bit from her face. She sits up on her shins and wipes the dirt on her palms off on her pants.

     “Do you live in a gulf?” she asks.

     Roxanne blinks. “No, Jade, I’d say it’s more of a bay.”

     This answer is enough for her. She doesn’t move to crawl out from under the table, but both doctors can tell they’ve done something right. At the same time, they move to inch away from her hiding spot and give her more space. With time, she might scuttle out on her own.

 

 

     It is outrageous how much booze is hidden away in Dr. Harley’s office.

     Jade would not give any good hints as to where the mysterious hidden room lie. In the end it was Roxanne who patted along the foyer walls until she felt the creases in the wallpaper and forced it open, swiveling mechanically to reveal an office not unlike the one Jacob had in Hauntswitch. It reeked of freshly cleaned mahogany, pungent and earthy and rich. A grandfather clock thunked dully in the background, echoed by little gold clocks behind glass panels, and the Drs. Lalonde and Claire breathed in the scent of faded leather and musty carpet.

     Now, Roxanne leans as far back in Dr. Harley’s office chair as it’ll go without whining in protest. Her boots are propped up on the desk, scattering bits of dried mud on a calendar for December 1999. It’s an idle month for Jacob. A birthday for Jade on the first, a scheduled report back to the mainland on the fourteenth. Roxanne recalls that this report never made it to her inbox.

     She knew it would be the third bookcase from the left that housed the liquor. Tucked in a bottom drawer that slid out easily enough. It was the same in his other offices, too. A young Roxy would open the drawer only for her guardian to snap it shut again. Don’t drink any of that, Dr. Harley scolded, it’s poison. Roxy wondered why it was that Dr. Harley kept poison in his office. Probably for the same reason Victorian ladies carried arsenic in their rings.

     In the chair across from the desk, Dr. Claire watches Roxanne Lalonde down a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle. Her mouth barely twitches at the taste, and the blush in her cheeks burns hotter. Roxanne, however, is good at concealing when she’s drunk. With the red in her face, she just looks embarrassed and a little confused.

     “That kid migh’ claw our eyes ou’ before she lets us wrestle her outta here,” Roxanne sighs. “The island’s all she knows. And if that _dog_ don’t want her to leave, well, we just wasted a month of our time. Bye bye, new Harley generation, have fun rotting in the fucking ocean….” She takes another swig. Her forehead shines with sweat.

     “Don’t be morbid, Roxanne. If we remain patient with her, Jade will leave this place. Every child knows when they don’t have any other option.”

     “M’kay. So we be optimists and say Jade comes home with us. What then?”

     Dr. Claire does not respond. Sometimes, there is no right response when debating Roxanne.

     “Do your kids know about her? We already claimed her as your grandkid. Who’s her parents s’pposed to be?”

     Dr. Claire still does not respond.

     “All right, all right, I’ll make it easy. I pull some strings at work, I talk to some people, I get some codes, we can get her in the system. Documented citizen ‘n everything. Can even throw in some tax forms, getcha those fresh benefits. Still don’t know who the fuck her mom ‘n dad are gonna be, though.”

     “She’s still so young, Roxanne, it won’t matter if we revise our story. I’ll claim her as my daughter. It isn’t as if she’ll remember down the road.”

     Roxanne hangs her head. It lolls a bit, and she looks like she’s nodding, but Alice can’t be sure.

     “ _Man_ ,” she says, “you are so lucky I can still forge a mean birth certificate.”

     “Yes, Roxanne, your skills when it comes to shunting unnaturally born children into the social security network is impressive. I don’t think the technicalities of what happens next are all that’s bothering you, though.”

     Roxanne laughs a little. Her voice goes deep and slow like it always is when she’s inebriated. “Of course it’s not, Alice. Your husband fuckin’ killed himself.”

     Dr. Claire sucks in a sharp breath.

     “He took this kid out where it’d take months for anyone to get to ‘em and fuckin’ shot himself right in the chest. He fuckin’ signed that kid’s death warrant, just about.” Roxanne swishes the whiskey around in her mouth and swallows, the muscles in her neck straining. “He knew how importan’ it was for us to take care of those kids. They’re meant to survive, above all else. So what the hell, am I right? Did he think he was makin’ her stronger by makin’ her take care of herself?”

     “Stop it,” Alice barks. Roxanne’s eyebrows shoot up. “It isn’t any use to speculate, Roxanne. Jacob had plenty of opportunities to reach out to us if something in his mental state had changed. He’s always been secretive, he’s always been coy, but if suicide was part of his plan all along, I know for a fact he would’ve let the hints leak through.”

     Roxanne considers this. Dr. Claire wouldn’t look at it, but on their way to the office she stopped to examine the body. A hole in his lapel was stitched shut – a little haphazard, a little obvious. Roxanne poked and prodded at the mark left behind until she could feel what must have been a similar suture in his skin. A toddler couldn’t make a shot so precise, let alone hold the pistol still, but if he twisted his own wrist in such a way… ah, well. She thinks of the man who she thought she knew so well. A little cold and a little aloof, but never cruel and never depressed. At least she thinks so. It always seemed like he valued his expeditions and his inventions and his investments more than his own person, like he viewed himself only a vessel to get Skaianet off the ground. Nothing was ever really about _him_ , just the next investigation, board meeting, or whatever else was crammed in his calendar. Maybe it got to be too much. A dog and a toddler are an adventure in themselves, but not the kind he was used to.

     “You can’t tell me you’re as unaffected as you look.”

     Dr. Claire makes a noise and crosses her arms. “You tell me, Roxanne. How do you think I feel?”

     “I think you’re suppressin’ shit like you always do. This is the last straw, right? The one tha’ broke the camel’s back. You wanted so bad for your husband to be normal. You liked the exploration and the discoveries and seein’ the whole world, but you had a baby and you wanted to stay in one spot. You wanted him to settle and adapt and learn to stick in a single house, but it was never gonna happen. And now you know! And now you know that _this_ is what happens when you box the famous Dr. Harley into a corner. He blasts himself to bits!” Roxanne laughs and gestures to the office as if it’s proof of his madness, then tilts the whiskey bottle back to drain it.

     Dr. Claire purses her lips tight and glowers at Roxanne from across the desk. The grandfather clock announces one in the morning, and the rest of the clocks chime to imitate it.

     “You know,” Roxanne muses, almost to herself, “the first drink I ever had was stolen from him. I was twelve. He was meeting a colleague after hours and left me in his office. I knew where he kept the booze, and I knew he wouldn’t miss it if I took it from the back of the cabinet. Kinda seemed like he never touched the stuff, anyway. Never locked it up, either. Maybe he was testin’ my integrity. I dunno.” She spins the bottle by the top of its neck and watches the amber reflect on the leather. “I started sneakin’ them back home in my backpack. Then he got me in the ole family business and I was old enough to drink, anyway, so what else did he think I was gonna do when he sat me down and walked me through the imminent fuckin’ apocalypse?”

     Roxanne sighs and fiddles with the label on the bottle.

     “Everything is going to break apart, Alice. The entire world as we know it. Everything will be lost, and there’s nothing we can do. Nothing but make sure our babies are prepared when they reach the other side.”

     Dr. Claire’s face softens. “I know.”

     Roxanne looks away. Folding her arms across her chest, she rests her face in her hand. The low light from the torches play across her face with orange and gold.

     “Hey, Alice?”

     “Yes?”

     “Why do you think he never adopted me?”

     Dr. Claire is taken aback by the question. She swallows hard. “Well, I….”

     “He lied to you, you know. I wasn’t the ‘ _child of his two best students_ ,’” she says in a mocking voice, throwing up air quotes, “And if I was, I never saw pictures of ‘em. When they ‘died’ on their field study? And there was that whole thing to get him permanent guardianship? Yeah, that never really happened. He wanted to raise me without me actually being his kid. When I was real little, I’d call him Dad sometimes. And he always insisted he wasn’t.

     “I know he saw me as his kid, though. I _know_ he did. It drove me crazy that he’d never validate that feeling I had, y’know? Like, he was never real smiley, never real affectionate, but I never saw him as happy as he was when he got to teach me stuff. Maybe I’m mixing things up? Maybe he saw me as a student, or an apprentice, or something else… a protégé to carry the mantle, but not his real daughter. Who knows.”

     Roxanne exhales slowly. Dr. Claire can smell the sting of alcohol on her breath even from feet away.

     “I never stopped holding you guys up as my parents, though. I knew I was family, but not _family_ family, and all I wanted was for someone to say, ‘Good news, the adoption paperwork went through! Surprise!’ But then I was eighteen, and, well, what was the point after that? So I learned to get used to it.”     

     Dr. Claire’s eyes prick with tears. “I’m sorry, Roxy. I’m so, so sorry.”

     “It’s not your fault.”

     “It is. I could have asked Jacob more questions about you. I could have adopted you myself whether or not he wanted me to.”

     Alice exhales. Everything she knows about Jacob is crumbling in front of her, every solid fact she’d weaseled out of him cracking in half. Roxanne is the only one left she can trust, the only one who wasn’t tainted by Dr. Harley’s desperation for privacy. The little girl in the pink sequin dress, the little girl with the Hello Kitty Band-Aids.

     “I know I’m not your mother, but I’ve always loved you. And I’m so proud of you, Roxy. We’d still be sitting clueless in Hauntswitch if it wasn’t for your bravery. You _are_ family. I’m sorry we let you down.”

     Roxanne swipes her hand under her eyes. “It’s okay, Alice. I think I might’ve known all that already.”

     Dr. Claire laughs, and Roxanne cracks a smile, and then both doctors are smacking their legs with laughter. Roxanne wipes a tear from the corner of her eye.

     “So, I guess you’re gonna raise that kid, huh?”

     Alice studies her hands. “There’s no other choice, is there?”

     “It’ll certainly be an experience. We’ll have to sit the kids down and have a long talk about it.”

     “It will be a lot for them to digest, yes.”

     Roxanne shrugs. “Joey and Jude have always been tough. Nothing really ever phases ‘em. I think Jade will integrate pretty well.”

     Dr. Claire smiles. “That’s true. It’s been a while since I’ve had to raise a child so young. Maybe it’ll add some years onto my life.”

     “Ah, shucks Alice, you’ve always been ageless. Kids’ll be askin’ if Jade’s your baby sister.”

     “You flatter me.”

     Roxanne struggles to push herself up out of the desk chair. She sways a bit and pats away the sweat on her temples. “Man, I’ve kept you up way too long. You gotta sleep off this fever, Alice. Let’s find somewhere to crash.”

     Dr. Claire lets Roxanne get her up out of the chair, and she drapes her arm around Roxanne’s shoulder. The hidden door gives way to the foyer, and a blast of cool and salty air hits them in the face.

     “Tomorrow we’ll get Jade outta bed and have a real breakfast, okay? No more canned shit on the boat deck. Maybe feedin’ her a few times will convince her to come home.”

     Dr. Claire nods. “That sounds nice.”

 

 

     It is a clear and bright day when the Drs. Lalonde and Claire lead Jade Harley to the shore of the island.

 

     It’s taken days to reach this point. Jade is an anxious and wary little thing. Sudden movements and strange remarks make her cringe, and she’s slow to trust anything the doctors tell her. Her wariness makes Becquerel antsy and snappy, which makes Jade even more skittish, which makes Becquerel even testier. The doctors, though, find out what will draw Jade out of hiding.

     They’ll sit out in the atrium’s wrought iron chairs and let the smell of warm food coax Jade into their company. The scent of it wafts up into the high ceiling, and soon enough the transportalizer lights up and she comes pittering across the tile. Dr. Claire cuts her portions of fish into pieces and gives her the eye when she doesn’t eat all of her vegetables, and Jade kicks her legs and jabs her spinach with her fork. They talk a little while they eat. Dr. Claire asks after Jade’s flowers, maybe offers to water them for her, and talks about the apple trees she tried to graft in her own backyard. She’s alarmingly smart, just not very articulate, and Dr. Claire raises her eyebrows each time Jade has an outburst of scientific jargon. Roxanne takes up the task of irradiating Becquerel’s meals – she’s more experienced with the radioactivity. He snaps it up out of the metal tongs she brandishes, and it only takes two dinners for Bec to tolerate a scratch behind the ears. Roxanne thinks his fur feels more like foam than hair.

     They pack up the house bit by bit. Dr. Claire carries Jade on her shoulders and distracts her with what washes up in the tide pools, Becquerel snuffling behind them to paw at the crabs while Roxanne picks apart the office, the laboratory, and Jade’s bedroom. The trunks they brought with them on the boat are joined by leather-bound moleskins, boxes of photographs and news clippings, Skaianet progress reports, financial paperwork, and countless other documents printed on stiff paper. Dr. Claire’s fever continues to wear her down. She sits in the tall grass and braids Jade’s hair with slow, trembling fingers. Behind her, one by one, Roxanne loads up the boat with what she deems important enough to save.

     It’s Roxanne who jumps from rock to rock with a camera thunking against her chest, leaping across the moat of saltwater to the frog temple. It strikes her how clean the markings are of erosion. Thousands of years old but perfectly new. An impossible language to comprehend, part hieroglyph and part Rongorongo. She traces the brine and the moss that grows along the walls, recognizing key sequences from Dr. Harley’s reports, and finally finds the point where he stopped translating. She takes pictures all up and down the temple, knowing somehow that she may never come back, and feels satisfied with what she’s recovered. Skaianet won’t have to half-ass the rest of the game’s programming now. Production can start up anew.

     And gradually, gradually, the Drs. Lalonde and Claire fall head over heels with Jade. For Roxanne, it’s not so much the similarity to her own Rose as how much she echoes her siblings. She has Jude’s caution and quirk, Joey’s brave face and adventurous curiosity. For Dr. Claire, perhaps due to the fever but maybe her off-kilter and awkward brand of parenting, it’s how much she wishes her husband had kept the child in Hauntswitch. She’s every bit Dr. Harley’s child, and it hurts her to have all that potential wasted. Family photos that were never taken, countless spare rooms that could have been made into bedrooms. She brushes back Jade’s hair each night into high buns, and both are surprised when the other tears up.

 

     Dr. Claire is already lying in the back of the boat when Roxanne is preparing to set sail. She has her arm over her eyes, using a pile of soft briefcases for a pillow. She mutters something in her discomfort. At the front of the boat, sea water is starting to lick at Roxanne’s boots. She’s crouched so that her hands can rest on Jade’s shoulders, and little Jade sniffs into the pilled fabric of a lavender Squiddle.

     “Now, now, Jade. We talked about this. People ride on boats all the time. Why, you’ve ridden on one without even remembering it! It’ll be fun, Jade. And when we get home, you won’t ever have to step foot on a boat again if you don’t want to.”

     It’s hard for her to speak clearly with Becquerel’s low grumbling behind Jade. He bares his teeth and paces, alternatively bunting at Jade’s sides and threatening to snap at Roxanne’s fingers.

     “What about Bec?” she asks. Her eyes are wide and wet.

     Roxanne licks her lips and spares a glance at the dog. “If you want to bring your puppy along, I’m not stopping you. You just have to get him onto the boat. Do you think you can do that?”

     Jade stares, then nods once. She shoves her Squiddle into Roxanne’s hands, then grabs her dog by the thick ruff of his fur. He yelps and whines as she tugs him towards the boat, and Roxanne is surprised at how authoritative she appears. Bec’s paws protest as he’s forced into the wet pebbles of the water. When she sees that she can’t get into the boat without letting go of him, Jade scrambles up onto the deck and then holds out her arms expectantly towards him.

     Becquerel has a small moral quandary. He paces in a circle and barks a couple of times. Then he tosses his head back towards the tower and crackles green, maybe casting a gaze at the old master whose body was both too heavy for the boat and too morbid to take back. In the end, his loyalty to the living outweighs his loyalty to an empty island. He tenses up his muscles and jumps onto the deck. The boat sways much too much given his mass, and Jade laughs with her arms around his neck as the ship tilts back and forth. Roxanne rests her hands on her hips and sighs.

     “You okay back there, Alice?” she calls.

     Dr. Claire gives an unintelligible response.

     “All right! You ready to set sail, Captain Jade?”

     Jade peers up from where she’s buried her face in Bec’s thick fur. Roxanne can already tell that bringing Becquerel was the best choice – she probably wouldn’t have made it without crying if he wasn’t with her. She nods her head again, and Roxanne ruffles her hair. Becquerel licks his lips and makes a mournful sound in his throat.

     “Then go on inside and lie down. We’ll be home before you know it.”

 

     It is still a clear and bright day when the Drs. Lalonde and Claire take Jade Harley to Hauntswitch. Jade will not think of it as going home. She will think of it like a long vacation, like once she’s done wherever they bring her, she can go back to the island and everything will be normal. Her grandfather might even be alive. Jade buries her face in Bec’s fur and breathes in the sandy smell of his fur. The sea will rock them back and forth and make her stomach hurt, and Jade calms herself into sleep by repeating over and over that it won’t be forever.

     But Jade is only four. She’s small and smart, but not very articulate. Her memory fizzles in and out of function as her naps carry her to the Kingdom of Light, and sometimes she cannot distinguish dreams from the real. Jade Harley will not look back on her time here as a dream. She will know it was real, even if the details of it are blurred, but at only four her memory is still so malleable. Jade Harley will leave the Pacific thinking of it as home, but this is the last time she will think of the word and associate it with that spire in the ocean.

     Like all the supporting characters in Dr. Harley’s grand adventure of a life, her world must stagnate before the event horizon swallows her whole. No one can ever keep up the pace – his wife knows this, as does his student-slash-almost-daughter. Every life must slow to a crawl to accommodate his whirlwind, even in death.

     Jade Harley curls herself tightly into Bec’s fur, having not a clue how the pace of her life has stalled.


	3. Chapter 3

     It is one thirty, and Becquerel is waiting in the middle of a faded hopscotch grid for his favorite human.

 

     Dr. Claire tried in vain to keep him in the yard. Becquerel snarls and snaps at the other dog in the house – maybe it’s a territory thing, but it’s more likely that Becquerel is just an asshole. The aging Tesseract, in his terror, exiles himself to his kennel in the basement. Chains and leashes and Invisible Fences accomplish nothing. Dr. Claire thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to tame Jade’s dog – the house reeks of his former master, so maybe he’d accept her as an authority. No such luck. He comes and goes as he pleases, sometimes bringing strange animals and horrible smells back into the house. Thankfully, no one else is home when he drops a limp wombat on her bed.

     Three weeks into Jade’s enrollment at a nearby preschool, Dr. Claire stops picking her up. She’d try to park out on the curb with the other parents and wait for Jade to climb into the backseat, but then that dog would materialize outside the window and bark until Jade got out again. Then Dr. Claire would have to drive at a maddening five miles per hour to follow them all the way home, not to mention look like a kidnapper in the process. What’s the point in wasting gas if Jade’s omnipotent dog can escort her home safely? Any free babysitter is fine with her, even if it has four legs.

 

     A cluster of parents outside the school tilt their heads to look at the unusually large dog sitting in the courtyard. The gates are still closed, so it’s a mystery how he got in. Two moms strain their necks looking for a collar, worrying whether the dog is feral. But then the school bell rings and the kids filter out and the dog does nothing. The few children brave enough to pet it are not offered any affection, and then they’re called away by their parents. When a familiar face appears in the crowd, Becquerel’s tongue lolls out and he wags his tail. Jade throws her arms around his neck, and his fluff nearly swallows her from sight.

     “Oh, Jade, is this your dog?” her homeroom teacher asks.

     Jade reemerges from his neck fur. “Yeah. This is Bec.”

     This particular teacher has been keeping a careful eye on Jade. It isn’t as though she’s a bad or slow student – she’s just… unusual. During the first week, she barely speaks a word. When other kids approach her, she goes nonverbal. Being in groups makes her freeze up and lose her voice, a look of silent panic seizing her features. They seat her farther from the others, and Jade seems to do better when she isn’t crowded. But she continues to make herself a curiosity. She uses rulers to draw straight lines with her markers, picks the leaves off of the windowsill plants and tries to eat them, and every now and then she surprises someone with a word like “chlorophyll” or “glucose” or “nuclear fission.”

     Her mother is called twice. She stays after class five times. One Saturday, on behest of the homeroom teacher, Dr. Claire drives Jade to a psychiatrist. An hour in his office yields next to nothing. He’s reluctant to diagnose her with anything.

     - Probably just shy, he says.

     - No shit, Dr. Claire says.

     Another psychiatrist will tell her that she’s just acting out. A third will tentatively diagnose her with autism. Dr. Claire does not tell the preschool about the third psychiatrist. The last thing she wants is a new excuse to alienate her.

     Nowadays, Jade perks up during the last hour or so of class. Her gaze strays to the window every few minutes, and sometimes she must be reminded that lessons are still going on. Jade’s teacher wonders whether she’s just excited to wriggle free of them for the day. Or maybe she’s excited to see her dog.

     The teacher gives a strained smile to the dog in the courtyard.

     “How nice! Did your mother bring him along with her?”

     “No. Bec takes me home.”

     The teacher blinks. She’s the type to wish ill on any parent who lets their kid walk home by themselves, but sending a dog in one’s stead is new.

     “Oh, Jade, don’t you think that might be inappropriate? Here, we can call your mother in the office and have her –”

     She reaches out to usher Jade back inside, but Becquerel’s lips curl back and he gives a deep growl from his throat. Jade gazes up at her teacher, oblivious to what’s wrong with this picture.

     “Ah. Nevermind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Jade. Be safe.”

     Jade tosses an arm around Bec’s neck and turns to leave. “Bye!”

 

 

     It takes a lot more effort to raise a kid when they’ve lived their infancy off the grid.

     Roxanne didn’t fail to deliver when it came time to file Jade into the world of documented Americans. Dr. Claire keeps a manila folder in her office, filled with every paper that would pass Jade off as someone who wasn’t born from a tube. A birth certificate, a Social Security card, tax forms that claim an infant Jade as Alice’s dependent. The idea of being arrested for all of this makes Dr. Claire sort of giddy. She’s finally living the rebellious life that she always suspected her husband was getting up to in his spare time. That, or the giddiness is just the feverish bug that’s stubbornly refused to leave her system.

     Getting the details on paper is one thing. Getting Jade to parrot the desired story is another. Dr. Claire clucks her tongue and shakes her finger each time she uses the words “grandpa” or “grandma.”

     “Now, Jade, remember what I told you? My husband and I are your parents. I am your mother.”

     “But Grandpa said –”

     “Jade, sometimes when parents have children when they are older, they have their kids call them those names because it sounds funny. We’re making fun of ourselves for being _so old_ ,” she says, pulling down on her eye bags and sticking out her tongue. Jade barely smiles. “Your father called himself your grandpa for that reason, and so did I.”

     Jade bites her bottom lip. Dr. Claire hopes she’s not astute enough to notice they look nothing alike.

     When it’s time to enroll Jade in the public school system, she regurgitates the story Dr. Claire told her. Pacific island? Tower in the middle of the ocean? Space-bending dog? Never heard of them. Dr. Claire’s heart pounds all throughout the interview. The woman on the other side of the desk, however, seems charmed by Jade, who’s quiet and well put together, if not slow to answer questions. The woman asks Dr. Claire whether she’s considered a speech therapist. Jade’s pronunciation is a bit off, she says. Some odd inflections, too. Therapy would make the transition easier. Dr. Claire nods and considers it.

 

     Roxanne is also the one who makes the phone calls to summon Jude and Joey back home. Jude misses a Thursday class to catch a flight home, and Joey scrambles to find someone to cover her weekend shifts. In the end, the “long talk” doesn’t take place at home. Dr. Claire loads her kids into her car and drives them to a gravel road that splinters off the highway, twisting and turning into what becomes Skaianet’s employee lot. She leads them to the ectobiology labs with her military-grade key cards, and Jude marvels at the half-formed creatures floating in their own fluids. This isn’t Joey’s first time in the underbelly of Skaianet, but the real thing is different from the Dexter’s Laboratory of her memories. She recalls a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old Roxanne in lab whites, strange vials tucked in her arms. Jude has no memories of this place, however. The Drs. Harley and Claire decided that their only biological child would live a more domesticated life. When their mother sits them down in what used to be Dr. Harley’s lab office, he can hardly sit still.

     It takes her a long time to get to the most important part of the story – the “your father is dead” part. Joey cries. Jude rests his chin on his hand and stares at a spot on the tile. It will take another half hour of muted tears and weepy accusations before Dr. Claire is able to drop the next bomb on them: the “your father was preparing for the end of the world and was taking care of a child who is meant to survive it” bomb. Jude asks whether this means Dr. Harley was biologically engineering a superhuman to outlive nuclear fallout. Joey tells him to shut up. Dr. Claire rubs her temples and sighs.

     They drive back to Hauntswitch in silence. The radio is switched off, the lights on the dashboard poking through the black. Jude folds his arms across his chest and stares at the headrest in front of him. Joey leans her head against the window and dabs at her nose with a crumpled Kleenex. Dr. Claire drives past the turnoff to Harley Manor, and keeps driving until she turns right into Rainbow Run. The lights in the Lalonde’s house are still on. Dr. Claire brings them to the door – more or less tugging Joey by the arm – and Roxanne has drinks waiting for them inside.

 

     “She’s always so stellar, Alice, I swear!” Roxanne says from in the kitchen. The sound of clinking glass carries over to the living room. Dr. Harley’s kids feel like blotches in the middle of the Lalonde’s open layout, stark white home. No flash photography in the museum. “You’d think she’d raise hell to make up for lost time, y’know? But nope! I wish she’d give Rose a few pointers on what surfaces are appropriate for crayon.”

     Joey’s attention is caught by the sound of Rose laughing. On one of the couches, Roxanne’s daughter is playing with a girl her age. Her face is dark and freckled, her black hair pulled back into two buns. A wave of cold revulsion washes over her. She elbows Jude in the ribs.

     “That must be her,” she whispers. “Christ. She doesn’t look like either of us.”

     Jude's shoulders droop. “So the superhuman theory goes out the window. She’s just a normal kid.”

     “I don’t know how you can joke about this.”

     “I’m not doing it on purpose!”

     “Hey, quit hissin’ over there!” Roxanne calls. “Wanna take a seat or something? Wouldn’t be surprised if your asses are still numb from sitting so long. Especially you, Jude, I know how those cross-country flights can be….”

     She comes out with warm mugs in her arms, and the kids only accept them after receiving a pointed look from their mother. The two doctors sit beside each other across from Rose and Jade. Still aloof from the night’s discussion, Joey and Jude sit on the couch between the doctors and the kids.

     With all the grown-ups seated, the little girls take an interest in something other than each other. Rose relinquishes her python grip on the family cat, and Jaspers leaps down to sniff Joey and Jude’s shoes. Jade glues her gaze on the new visitors. When they make eye contact, Joey shudders and looks away.

     “Well,” Roxanne sighs. She casts an uncomfortable look over everyone in the room. “How are you feeling?”

     Jude clears his throat and starts to respond, but Joey swats his arm to shut him up. She stares at Dr. Lalonde in a way that she only did when a teenaged Roxanne wouldn’t let her watch Animal Planet.

     “You went with her,” she says. “You saw him for yourself then, yeah?”

     The forced nicety dissolves from Roxanne’s face. “Yes, Joey. If you wish you had gone with us, I’d advise you not to be envious. What we found on that island was nothing I’d want you to see.”

     Jude glances at Jade and sees that she’s already looking at him. Her glasses make her look like a curious owl. He crosses his eyes at her, and she cracks a smile.

     “Hm, I guess I should just be ‘envious’ that you knew all this shit about my dad that I didn’t. How long have you guys been planning this mad scientist crap? Like, what, was Dad gone all the time so he could see the most of the world before it’s blown to bits?”

     “Joey, I didn’t want you to have the same last impression of your father that we had.”

     “Oh, my god! I don’t _care_ that you didn’t bring me on your manhunt!” Joey wrings her shirt hem in her hands. “I care that there’s a metric fuckton about Dad that was conveniently left out of conversation for _years_! If he could trust you, why not us? Were we not _worthy_?”

     Dr. Claire sets her mug on the glass tabletop. “Joey –”

     “Don’t. Please, just don’t.”

     Somewhere, a tiny clock is ticking. Jaspers’ claws click on the floorboards as he wanders off to find a snack.

     Joey won’t meet her mother’s eye. Instead, she just stares at her lap in sullen anger. Dr. Claire notices her son exchanging funny faces with Jade.

     “Well, Joey,” Dr. Claire sighs. “I hope you’re not going to take this out on your sister.”

     Joey flinches, then hunches her shoulders and folds her arms.

     “She’s moving into your room. It’s the only clean one. I’m keeping your storage in the hall closet.”

     She snorts. “Yeah, I bet.”

     “Joanne.”

     “What do you _want_ from me?”

     “A simple hello would suffice.”

     Joey shoots a look at Jade only to see that she’s being distracted by Jude. Her eyes dart between the two of them, and the hot, hateful lava popping in her chest starts to char over into a cool and smoldering gray. Jade feels Joey’s eyes on her, and the delighted smile flickers from her face. Joey is overwhelmed with a feeling not unlike accidentally trampling a flowerbed.

     “Hi,” she says mechanically.

     Jade stares at Joey for a moment, then goes back to playing with Rose.

 

 

     It is just starting to get warmer out when Dr. Claire’s children take her car keys away.

     Another spring break has arrived. Jude is only home for a few days, so Joey pauses her post-graduate job hunt to help him deal with the new reality of staying in Harley Manor. Neither are willing to mention out loud that Dr. Claire is getting frailer. She moves slowly, takes stairs one at a time, gets overheated too easily. One of them might get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and hear their mother muttering in her sleep, tossing and turning while sweat beads on her forehead. And it can only get worse from here.

 

     It starts when Joey is in her mother’s office.

     There are still boxes from the Pacific to be filed away, and it’s a pain in the ass to cram all of Dad’s moleskins into the limited shelf space. The sweat sticks to the back of her neck. Dr. Claire is still at her desk, but her attention is swallowed in her work. Joey tries to make conversation, but as far as her mom is concerned, she might as well not be there. She lets herself get distracted and crouches down to flip through some of the loose folders. It all smells so yellow. One of them is especially think, held together with rubber bands, and Joey pulls out one of the papers from the middle. It’s a photocopy that’s splotched with shiny black ink, stamped at the top with the Skaianet logo. For a moment Joey’s heart skips, thinking that it might be some secretive report on mind-boggling technology, but it’s just tax returns. She slips it back into the folder and sighs.

     Across the office, Dr. Claire slams her notebook shut. Joey snaps to attention. Her mother’s face looks haggard. Her hair lies close to her head, and she’s stopped wearing jewelry for a few months now, which gives her an underwhelming look. Joey wonders why she didn’t notice until now that Dr. Claire is wearing the same shirt she wore yesterday.

     “Where is she?” Dr. Claire asks. Her voice is hollow. When Joey doesn’t immediately respond, she stands up and shrieks “ _Jade_!”

     A tiny thump from down the hall. The door that used to be Joey’s creaks open, and Jade pitters into view. She lingers in the hallway, her hand resting on the doorframe.

     Jade blinks twice – her version of “ _You called for me, Mom?_ ”

     Jade Harley will be six before the end of the year. Living under Dr. Claire’s roof hasn’t made her look any healthier – she’s still very short, very slight, very thin. Every time Joey has come over, she’s stayed holed up in her room with her dog and her books and her markers. It’s given Joey the impression that her baby stepsister is weird, but Jude always insists that this is not the norm for her. When he’s left alone with her to babysit, she’s chatty and high energy and quick to laugh. Her laughter is so loud, he says, like you’ve never heard a happier noise before in your life.

     Joey sometimes envies Jude for how fast he is at adapting to the bizarre. She used to be like that, too, but then high school ended and Dad disappeared and she clung to everything that reeked of normalcy. Tesseract may be gone, but Jude’s getting used to the demon dog just as well. He’s found that Becquerel likes to play with the old remote-control helicopters he got after the pigeons became too high-maintenance. She can always hear them all shrieking with laughter in the backyard from the guest bedroom. Maybe Joey is also envious that Jade likes him better.

     “Jade,” Dr. Claire rasps, “come here.”

     Jade approaches. She glances quickly at Joey out of the corner of her eye, and then she disappears behind the height of Dr. Claire’s desk. The only part of her that can be seen is her bun, which sits at the top of her head.

     The shuffling of loose paper. Dr. Claire is showing Jade the inside of a wrinkled notebook scavenged from the island. Joey cranes her neck to see the look on Jade’s face.

     “Do you recognize this, dear?”

     Indecision passes over Jade’s face. Joey can tell that whatever it is, the answer is yes, but Jade looks conflicted on whether she should be honest. She chews on her bottom lip, exaggerating her overbite, then shakes her head.

     “ _Damn it_!” Dr. Claire shouts. Jade flinches and recoils, and then their mother throws the moleskin across the room with surprising strength. It clatters against a glass cabinet and lands face-up on the floor.

     Joey jumps up from the floor and makes a grab for it. It’s written in her father’s tight, almost illegible cursive, but years of reading his letters and his notes on the fridge means that she can read it well enough. She scrunches her nose to focus on the letters. It looks like little nature studies – sketchy thumbnails of snakelike beasts and monsters with tusks. A lumbering giant stands taller than the tree next to it, a patch of fungi under the shadow of its foot. There are reptiles that exhale mucus bubbles, featureless humanoids with beetle eyes, a mountain in the sky that looks carved away like a rice terrace. Joey flips to the previous pages, but can’t find any context for them.

     Their father was never into the fantastical like her mother and brother were. He acknowledged Jude’s paranormal fascinations with aloof amusement, but nothing more. But then again, Dr. Harley has apparently been preparing for the apocalypse for the past several decades. Couldn’t these just be marginalia as he took breaks from his serious work? Joey can justify either option.

     “You little _liar_! You’ve all been conspiring together, haven’t you?” Dr. Claire continues. Joey drops the notebook and turns to look at her mother. Jade has backed up a few steps, her arms curling into her chest. “Plotting and planning like you thought you’d never be found out! He knows what you know! He knows what you’re able to see, the things no one else can see, he knows you can see the clouds, and so do I….”

     The sudden outburst takes the air out of her. Dr. Claire rests her hand on the desk ledge, looking a little deflated. Joey hears chair legs scrape downstairs, and then the sound of Jude taking the stairs two at a time. Her brother appears in the doorway and pushes his glasses up his nose.

 _What’s going on?_ he mouths to his sister.

     Joey jabs her thumb in Dr. Claire’s direction and makes a spinning gesture with her pointer finger. _She’s going nuts._

     “I’ll bet you killed him yourself, you liar, you _scheming_ … fulfilling what Skaia told you, the clouds told you to… complete the time loop, you, you… murdered my husband….”

     Jade startles when her back brushes a stout globe by the window. Dr. Claire approaches her, lifting her hand above her head, and Jude rushes across the room to get between them. Dr. Claire almost screams at the sudden appearance of her son.

     “Whoa, _whoa_ , Mom, let’s calm down, okay?” Jude rests his hands on her shoulders, and she struggles to get around him.

     “Let go of me, Jude, god damn it!” she shouts.

     “Mom, hey! Hey, there’s nothing to shout about, all right? You don’t wanna yell at Jade, do you? Look, come on, you’re scaring her.”

     “ _She_ is the reason we’re like this!” Dr. Claire shoots. Her eyes are wide and glazed, the veins popping out of her hands. “Shouldn’t have let Jacob leave… she’s a feral child, she doesn’t know how to behave, doesn’t know, only obeys the clouds….”

     “Geez, Mom, really, you don’t believe all that, do you?”

     Jude looks at his sister and jerks his head towards Jade. Joey scrambles up from the floor and goes to tug Jade away by the forearm. She stumbles a bit, looking at Dr. Claire over her shoulder. Their mother watches them go.

     “Ah – wait!” she wails. “Wait, come back!” She’s not talking to Joey, and Joey knows this, and it makes her feel even more invisible. Her eyes follow only Jade, and the fury that lit up her face dissolves into a painful sorrow. “Jade, come here, don’t walk away from me! Jade, I am _speaking_ to you!”

     Jude lets go of Dr. Claire and instead pulls her into a hug. She seems shorter now than he remembers, and he wonders when he got so tall. Or, alternatively, when she got so frail. Dr. Claire cries into her son’s shoulder and stains his shirt with tears, and it feels like hours that they stand there in the midmorning light.

 

     And it gets worse, of course. Remember?

     Roxanne passes in and out of the house, usually after one of the kids calls her. She sits in Alice’s bedroom and they murmur to each other behind the closed door. She starts bringing Jade home with her each night – when Dr. Claire is more likely to wake up in a half-asleep hysteria and pound on the kids’ doors – and starts bringing back a medical doctor from Skaianet to examine the weakening Dr. Claire. Their mother refuses to be hospitalized. She insists that she’s fine. Joey and Jude are kept out of the room. One weekend, Roxanne calls them in to sign paperwork. Signature here, initial here and there, date here. Dr. Claire stares at the ceiling with pupils that dart back and forth.

     Jude is the one who confiscates his mother’s keys. No one thought it would come to this – they thought she’d be too weak to drive. But when he finds her at three a.m. in the driveway, fumbling with the ignition and cursing about being “overdue” somewhere, he has to draw a line. At least he gets his own car now, Jude thinks wryly.

     He uses her SUV to drive Jade in circles around the block because it’s still the fastest way to get her to sleep. He calls his university to tell them he won’t be back for the rest of the semester. He gets his roommates to send him final exam material. He sits in the hall chair outside his mother’s office and accepts that he probably won’t return for his junior year.

     But with the Harleys, it can always get worse, even when it’s gotten worse countless times before. Maybe it just comes with the territory. Maybe being a mismatched quilt of a family means that all the overlapping patches can hold twice the weight. In any case, it can always topple further out of control. And it will. Of course it will.

 

 

     It is well past Rose’s bedtime, and Dr. Lalonde is certain that her daughter is asleep. Unfortunately for Roxanne, Rose has mastered the art of using reading lights under the sheets.

     Rose’s mother is plastered when she eventually makes her way upstairs, and Rose is absorbed in a large-print copy of _The Sorcerer’s Stone_. At only six, she doesn’t understand some of the words, and she pronounces “Lucius” like it’s a play on “luscious,” but otherwise she’s a decent reader. When Hermione is just about to set Professor Snape’s robes ablaze, Rose is ripped to reality by the sound of her mother’s heels creaking on the steps. Soon she’ll crack the door open to see if she’s asleep. She didn’t used to have to open the door – Jaspers would paw the door open to sleep at the end of her bed some nights – but Jaspers is gone and the Lalondes are the only two in the house. Rose switches off the reading light and lies down, keeping her thumb tucked into the book to mark her page.

     Roxanne, as we know, is plastered. A bottle of wine has disappeared in only two hours, and roughly the same amount of fluid has been forced out of her eyes. She doesn’t know the last time she went to a funeral. Maybe it was for one of Dr. Harley’s ancient colleagues, back when she only reached his knee and didn’t get why everyone was so sad. Dr. Harley, of course, was probably straight-faced the entire time – he kept mummies in his own house, for Christ’s sake. In any case, Roxanne was not expecting to cry as much as she did this week. Her feet are sore, her dress feels dirty, and she knows for a fact that her eyeliner is smudged – she checked her make-up in the reflection of the microwave. At the top of the stairs, Roxanne kicks her heels off and leaves them there.

     Poor Jade. For such a smiley little girl, she inspires so much pity in Roxanne. Especially now. She’s still just the girl hiding under the atrium table, terrified that the strangers were going to mess up her life even more. And who’s to say her fears were unfounded? Her emotional health hasn’t had much opportunity to flourish in Washington. Her speech has become a little more enunciated, but other than that? Please.

     Jade was awfully composed during the service. Her black hair seemed to melt into her little sweater of the same color, and she allowed strangers to pat her head while she snacked on cubes of cheese. A heated debate resulted in Dr. Claire’s casket being left open, and Jude reluctantly held her up to look at their mother. Joey lingered behind them. Roxanne watched Jade watch Dr. Claire. Jade looked a bit curious, but otherwise unaffected. Maybe two years wasn’t enough time to bond with the woman who took her away from her home. Maybe Dr. Claire’s worsening condition stained any chance of a stable, affectionate relationship. Maybe Jade was by now accustomed to having the small constants in her life taken away. Or maybe she just assumed someone would eventually stuff Dr. Claire and mount her in front of the fireplace.

     Roxanne straightens her shoulders and tries to shake the drunk out of her arms as she stands in front of Rose’s door. Usually she just pokes her head in, but tonight she is so, so, sad, and Rose is the only one who can ever make her feel any better. Roxanne pushes Rose’s door open and stands in the threshold in her stocking feet. The soft lavender of the night light coasts over the blankets and makes it all look unreal.

     Ah, and she’s asleep. Roxanne pads into the room and leaves the door cracked, then sits on the end of Rose’s bed. With her eyes still shut, Rose forces herself not to grimace. Every second her mom spends in here is a second she could be reading. Her mother smooths out the wrinkles in the comforter and sighs. Under the floor, the furnace kicks on.

     “I’m sorry if I scared you on Sunday,” she says to the room, sure that her daughter can’t hear. “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen Mom cry, hasn’ it? I must’ve looked so silly.”

     Rose keeps her eyes closed. No, it did not scare her to see her mother cry. Actually, it just made her feel bad. If that’s how you’re _supposed_ to act during a funeral, she knows for sure that the ceremony for Jaspers was a big fat parody of one. Her mom didn’t shed a tear for the family cat. But of course, Rose couldn’t see her mother’s eyes through the lenses of her sunglasses.

     “I guess I jus’ can’t stop thinkin’ about how differen’ our lives could’ve been. You know, the real estate deal was almos’ done. I coulda moved us to New York, way out in the woods, all havin’ pinecones and chipmunks for neighbors. What if that had been me? What if Dad somehow succeeded in makin’ me the same lone wolf as him? We coulda lived out there all alone, and I woulda had the lab to keep me occupied, and maybe I’d’ve ended up the same as him in the end. Leavin’ my damn kids to fend for themselves. God.”

     Roxanne sighs and lays down across the end of the bed. Rose can smell the reek of alcohol on her. It sticks to her skin.

     “Maybe you woulda liked it, Rosie. Bein’ away from the world like a l’il Emily Dickenson. All the time in the world to read your storybooks. But then you’d be away from your best friend, right? Jade would be all the way out here.”

     Rose’s heart jumps at this. Her tutors always speak to Roxanne in hushed whispers when it’s time for them to leave. Through the vents, Rose catches phrases like “socially disinterested” and “stunted emotional expression.” She’s still only six, after all, but Rose understands that the adults in her life view her as sort of antisocial. That’s not true, though. She just has a very select circle of friends. Okay, one friend. But in all fairness, her other friend is in a cat mausoleum out back.

     “You like living out here, right, Rosie? I think I did the right thing. I think… I think it’s gonna be real scary bein’ responsible for those kids now. Gotta make sure Jude doesn’t drop his baby sister on her head.” She laughs a drawling laugh, and Rose hears the exhaustion in her voice. “Woulda had three kids if I had my way. But he always told me not to overextend myself. Only one of the meteors was meant for me. We need four different lands, after all… can’t mess everything up by having two players in one house. Can’t go swoopin’ in on everyone who looks like they need a mom….”

     Rose has no idea what her mother is going on about.

     “I’m so tired of all this, Rosie. Isn’t that selfish of me? I’m not the one who’s gonna have the worst of it when it all finally happens.”

     Roxanne pushes herself up, and Rose is relieved that she can get back to reading, but then her mother readjusts herself so that she’s curled behind her. Still very small, Rose fits into the curve of her mother’s torso. Roxanne drapes her arm over Rose, and there’s a short second where Rose is afraid she’ll feel the book under the comforter. But she doesn’t. Roxanne sighs into the space above Rose’s head. Her clothes reek.

     “I’m such an embarrassing old lady,” Roxanne whispers. Rose can hear her falling asleep. “I don’t know how you put up with me, Rosie.”

     Then the tension in her muscles melts, and Rose knows for sure that her mother is asleep.

     It’s hard to say whether Rose will remember this night, when her mother has disappeared and she’s stranded on a planet of chalk and soap bubble sea. If she does, perhaps the memory is tainted – both by time and her own warped perception of her mother. Perhaps she’ll remember it as the delusions of a drunk, or a jab at Rose’s fantastical fascinations. Perhaps she’ll remember how she fit into the parenthesis of her mother’s body and wonder why she only received such affection when her mother thought she was asleep. Ah, but Rose is still only six. How would she begin to foresee all of this?

     She exhales and pulls her book out from under her mother’s arm, ready to read again.

 

 

     It has been quite a long time since Joey Claire and Jude Harley have fought this badly.

     The past week has been a whirlwind of paperwork and arrangements and finances. Old friends of Dr. Claire have come out of the woodwork to pay their respects. The house is cleaned haphazardly to make room for guests, and a number of macabre game trophies are shoved into coat closets. Jude has to step out of the lawyer’s office for fresh air when they find out how much their parents were really worth. Joey is resentful that she still had to work in retail. At the very least, settling the matters of inheritance will make it easier for Jude to take up residence in Harley Manor and care for their baby sister. Well, not “easy” in reality, but this is what Jude expects. He doesn’t anticipate the amount of maintenance that the huge manor will require, nor has anyone taught him about property taxes, _nor_ does he recognize the difference between parenting and just palling around with a little kid. At twenty-one, he thinks he’s had enough of his snobby university already. And if his father was able to start living independently at sixteen, why couldn’t Jude be capable of the same?

 

     The fight begins when both siblings are convinced that Jade is asleep. She’s slow to tire, but once she’s out, she’s _out_. The house is quiet without the sound of her little feet running all over the place. Joey leans against the Georgian dresser in the foyer, making all the dangling handles clink. Jude checks for the fourth time that the front door is securely locked.

     “Are you sure you’re okay with me taking the stag head?” Joey asks. The house has at least three dozen of these, but the one she’s referring to was mounted in Dr. Claire’s office.

     “Huh? Yeah, sure,” Jude mumbles to the door. “Kinda wish you’d take more, actually. I don’t even want to think about what’s been collecting in the attic.”

     There’s a short silence as both siblings try to remember the last time they’ve been in the attic. The answer for both of them is about eight years.

     “I think it’d make a nice necklace rack,” Joey muses. “Always wanted to hang stuff on it when we were younger.”

     “You _did_ hang stuff on it. Remember the Silly String debacle?”

     Joey’s shoulders bob with a short laugh. “Yeah, that was pretty funny.”

     “Yeah.”

     Outside, a car drives past the driveway and crunches through a long patch of gravel.

     “Do you really think I can do this, or were you just humoring me?”

     Joey looks up. Jude is leaning his shoulder against the door, and the shadows distort his face. The descent of night has made his confidence wane.

     “Sure I do. Look at you, Jude. I think you were the only kid in your dorm who did his own dishes more than once a semester. Jade’s always adored you. Maybe I’m a little scared you’ll revamp this place into an _X-Files_ museum,” Joey laughs, “but I think you’ve got it under control. It’s not as if you can’t ask for help, either. We’re all available.”

     “I don’t know. I appreciated Roxy vouching for me and all, but what if I screw this up? I was so confident before, but _man_ , after the looks those lawyers gave me….”

     The house settles, and the staircase pops.

     “Why didn’t you try to take Jade off my hands, Joey?”

     Joey bristles, then quickly smooths over her surprise. “You calling me old?” she tries to joke. “Anyone who saw my apartment would only need ten seconds to tell I can’t raise a kid. I work all hours, I’m out for recitals every damn month, I can barely even get Jade to look me in the eye. I mean, Mom gave _you_ the house, and Roxy wouldn’t take her, for whatever reason… she must’ve known you were meant for this.”

     “Like they knew about the end of the world.”

     Joey sighs. “Yeah, like that.”

     “So I guess my role in Mom and Dad’s plan is to raise our sister before she kicks off the apocalypse and leaves us all in the dust. That’s a comforting thought. I wonder how we should spend our last seven years.”

     “I thought this sort of science fiction baloney would excite you.”

     “Yeah, Jo, I’m super psyched that our parents kicked the can before telling us the half of this mess.”

     “Wow, I’m shocked, Jude. By how you romp around with Jade and her devil dog, I assumed you were comfortable with the turn of events. You know, not everyone would be keen to associate with the kid their dad ditched them for.”

     Jude’s eyebrow twitches. “She’s your sister, too. It’s been two years.”

     “We haven’t had much opportunity to get acquainted.”

     “That’s real funny, Joey. I would’ve thought you were above blaming children for your problems. Do your students know you’re this petty?”

     Joey unfolds her arms and gives Jude a sharp look. The desk lamp behind her head makes her look threatening, even though she’s short and shrimpy for twenty-six.

     “Dad left because he thought that kid was more important than us. Why should we follow his example and value her over ourselves?”

     “She didn’t _force_ him to leave us, Joey! He saw what his options were and he made his _own_ decision to disappear.”

 

     Upstairs, Jade Harley has woken up in the middle of the night. Well, it’s only nine, but for six-year-olds this is the equivalent of one in the morning. The sky hasn’t gone completely black yet. Jade blinks in the blurriness. A long rectangle of dark blue comes in through the window and sputters out near the fluffy rug in the middle of the room – a relic of when this room was Joey’s.

     Last week, Jade Harley’s mother died. Or, her grandma, or something in between. It’s been hard to find the distinction.

     Dr. Claire, for the most part, had always been very kind to Jade. She took her out into the yard on weekends and let her clip back the ivy that crept along the crumbling back wall. She let Jade pick out new flowers to line the front walkway. She let Bec sleep in her room at night – not that she had a choice. She braided her hair back every night and clipped it close to her head to keep it nice and tidy. Sometimes she even humored Jade in hide-and-seek, although there’s much less to hide behind in this house. It was the yelling that Jade didn’t like so much.

     It became difficult to tell how Dr. Claire was going to act. Sometimes she labored up and down the stairs with sweat on her forehead, and on these days Jade would hear her shoving things off her desk and stomping up and down the halls. She never hit Jade – Becquerel would never let that happen – but Jade learned to recoil from her even when she was sweet and gentle.  

     Two months ago, she lie in her bedroom and called Jade in through the cracked door.

     - Jade, dear, come in here and spend some time with Mom.

     Jade lingered in the doorway and only let herself in when Dr. Claire beckoned her with her thin hand.

     - Come sit on the bed, Jade, and I’ll tell you a story. Joanne loved to do that when she was your age. We'd have the house to ourselves and… well, come on, you can do it, can’t you?

     Dr. Claire’s voice would roughen with that sharp edge, and it made Jade shrink from the edge of the bed. Once her irritation was piqued, it was a sharp decline from there.

     - You know, I got _sick_ traveling all those thousands of miles to rescue you! Something about that awful air… does things to a person, but you wouldn’t know about that, would you? You’d be rotting on that island if it weren’t for me, do you understand? Rotting with my husband, not that you care about that!

     - I do care.

     - What’s that? You want to talk for once? Well, speak up!

     - I didn’t hurt G–, Jade winces, – Dad. I told you. The blue girl did it.

     - Oh, _please_ , Jade, aren’t you old enough to know better? Dolls aren’t _alive_. They can’t hurt anyone.

     Jade does not find this argument particularly compelling, considering that the blue girl still finds her way into her nightmares. The details of the island are starting to fade – the marble on the atrium columns, the scent of the front room like old cigars – but the blue girl is hard to forget.

 

     It occurs to Jade that she’s hungry. She remembers that Jude left a bowl of pears in the kitchen from when Roxanne visited today. A slit of light from the hallway crawls across the floorboards – she could sneak downstairs without making much noise. Becquerel opens his mouth in a wide yawn when she hops out of bed, and she scratches behind his ears. He sniffs her hand and flops back over, letting out a tiny sigh.

     Jade has made a game of finding each of the creaky spots in the old floor. It’s fun to jump on them and hear them whine – the island’s floors were cold and stony – but it’s good to know when to avoid them. She hops around them on her tiny feet, slips out the cracked door, and toes her way down the winding hallway.

     Chandelier light from the main stairwell traces the hall décor. She likes to look at the photos on the wall, the ones that fill the blank space between the antiques. There’s Mom and Dad sitting on the hood of a Jeep in the middle of the savanna, Dr. Claire laughing in her sunglasses and Dr. Harley resting his elbows on his knees. There’s an off-focus sepia photo of Joey in a flouncy recital dress, giving a toothy smile in front of the living room fireplace. Jude tells her that Joey used to replace a lot of these pictures with pages from her gaming magazines and _Pokémon_ books. Sometimes it’d take weeks for anyone to notice. Once, their father came home from Peru and walked right past a statue she’d wrestled into a tutu. The lack of a reaction was always what disappointed her.

     The kids have been making an effort to insert Jade into this patchwork of photography. Down the front stairs, Jude has hung up some new, glossier photos of Jade. A candid of her and Becquerel sleeping on the back porch, a shot from her fifth birthday in which Roxanne props her on her knee and points to the camera so Jade will look into it. Jade is not aware of it, but it’s when these photos start popping up that she realizes she isn’t a temporary guest.

     She reaches the top of the stairs and hears that her siblings are awake. They speak quietly, but she hears the edge in their voices. They’re trying not to wake her up. But Jade is good at sneaking around – eventually they’ll settle somewhere else and Jade will have the opportunity to dart down the stairs. She crouches down low and peers through the banister.

 

     “ _Why_ are you so upset? He did this to us all the time even before Jade came into the picture! I mean, God, Rose didn’t make _Roxy_ crazy! You’re seeing a variable that isn’t there.”

     “Roxy didn’t have anything to be distracted from other than her cat, Jude. A family is different.”

     “He was _always_ gone, Joey, why do you wanna pin it all on her?”

     “Because it goes back deeper than that, Jude! _I_ was the one who put all of Mom’s files away. _I_ was the one who had to read all that shit about Skaianet this, game that, and remember what I was doing on each of those little dates. You know how much it _sucks_ to know he cared more about translating fucking runes than being here when I _moved out_?”

     “Wow!” Jude’s hands fly up, and he starts to pace around the foyer. This startles and unsettles Jade, and she grips onto the bannister – though Dr. Claire has told her that Jude used to be an irritable little scaredy-cat, she’s never been able to picture it. “And somehow it’s still all about how _you_ feel.”

     Joey starts to say something, but he continues to talk over her.

     “This kid is sensitive, and afraid, and everything in her life keeps changing. Can’t just put that aside and realize she doesn’t need to be a scapegoat too?”

 

     Jade does not know what a scapegoat is. It sounds kind of cute.

     “I can’t believe you don’t get it. Everything he’s ever done has been about _her_. We were just afterthoughts.”

     The wind outside makes the windowpanes creak.

     “All those times we thought he was in Iceland or wherever… he was on that island, hiding out like some sort of – like some sort of _lunatic_ preparing for her to drop out of the sky! He had whole journals, Jude, daily logs that never once mentioned us.”

     Joey’s shoulders droop.

     “He was on that island when… well. Yeah.”

     Jade has no idea what her siblings are going on about.

     “His stuff with Skaianet, all that crazy apocalypse stuff… he let it into his house, kept it with all the other crap, like he forgot he had a family that could still be hurt. That thing could’ve killed me, Jude. I could’ve been trapped on that planet forever.”

     The atmosphere in the room dampens. Jude’s fists relax, and he looks at her with enormous pity.

     For Jude, the most distinctive memories are of the aftermath. Figuring out how to tell Mom what broke the picture frames, vacuuming up the shards of glass, helping Joey into her room after her knees buckled from exhaustion, apologizing to an oblivious Tesseract for how they were going to blame him for the scratch marks in the furniture. And then, being so uneasy in the treehouse that it stopped being a safe haven. For the next few years, he thinks of himself and Joey like the siblings from _Jumanji_. Boy, that sure was a whacky adventure we just had! Let’s pretend it never happened and go back to our totally normal lives.

     “I know.”

     “He was gone, and his stupid _thing_ could’ve ruined my life.”

     “I know.”

     “Do you really?”

     Jade’s legs are getting numb. She wishes they’d hurry up and go somewhere else.

     “Please, Jo, I’m not trying to be heartless here.”

     Jade hears her sister sniff.

     “I get it, okay? You’re mad, and grieving, and all of this is confusing as hell. You want someone to blame.”

     “And you’re not grieving? You’re not mad?” Joey’s voice is wet. “I shouldn’t be the bad guy for being sorry that my parents are dead.”

     “I’m not telling you that you can’t mourn what happened to them. I’m not telling you to convince yourself they didn’t care. But if Dad failed us, he failed Jade, too. Everything he did to us, he did to her. He left her behind, Joey. You know that.”

     Joey doesn’t say anything.

     “She’s one of us, Jo. All we have is each other. Please, _please_ don’t let her grow up wondering why her sister hates her.”

     “Jesus, Jude, I don’t _hate_ her. She’s just….”

     “She’s just a kid?”

     Jade feels a pang in her chest. Everyone always looks so happy to see her – even Joey gives her pursed little smiles. Are they just as mad at her as Dr. Claire was? Do they think they _killed_ him? Her palms sweat.

     “I cried all the way back to my dorm when I got off the plane. Wouldn’t talk to anyone. Wouldn’t eat. You know what the worst thing was? It wasn’t just that he was gone, y’know? It was that I couldn’t remember the last time we had spoken.”

     Joey rubs her arms like she’s cold.

     “I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t care. I’m sorry you thought you were alone in this.”

     His sister looks deflated.

     “We used to be different,” she murmurs. “I miss who I was, Jude.”

     “We just had to grow up faster,” Jude agrees. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

     They retreat to their corners of the boxing ring. Joey half-sits on the ledge of a table, and Jude collapses on the bottom step. He rests his elbows on his knees. For a while, neither of them speak.

     “Do you remember that Fourth of July?” Joey pipes up. “When we drove out to the beach and Dad let us light the fireworks?”

     “They looked like bombs,” Jude says. “Mom was freaking out about how we’d lose our fingers.”

     “And someone called the cops! And Mom loaded us all into the car, and we drove without the headlights on so we wouldn’t get caught.”

     “She chewed him out the whole way home!” Jude laughs, “And he just laughed.”

     “Oh my gosh, I think he almost ran into a tree because it was so dark, right? And Mom kept shouting and he just looked behind the seat at us and winked. God, that was fun.”

     “Yeah.” Jude scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, that was pretty great.”

     By now, Jade is experiencing an uncomfortable combination of nausea and hunger. She half-considers going back to bed. She knows she won’t be able to sleep, though, if she doesn’t know how this conversation ends. She wants to know her siblings don’t hate her.

     “Jade’s going back to school next week,” Jude starts.

     Joey sighs and fiddles with her short ponytail.

     “Maybe you could drive her to school someday? You could… try _talking_ to her?”

     There’s a long silence.

     “Man,” Joey sighs, “Roxy would knock me senseless if she could see me right now. Yeah, Jude, sure. I’ll drive the little squirt to school.”

     Jade thinks her sister’s voice sounds a little lighter.

     Jude offers her a hug, and Joey exhales with exasperation as she accepts it. They stand there for a long time, and Jade starts to get sleepy again, and as she falls asleep on the steps she can hear them both crying.

 

     It’s hard to say what goes through the kids’ minds when they find Jade all tuckered out on the stairs, her oversized _Squiddles!_ pajama shirt swallowing her up. It’s Jude who hauls her up the steps to bed. He feels what could probably be called fear – his gut sinks, his ribs push out to escape, and his feet feel heavy. There is no way of telling how much she’s heard, no way of telling how much she understands. He takes her up in his arms with extra care, and she mumbles sleepily into his shoulder, and the anger of the previous argument gives way to a soft melancholy.

     Joey experiences what could probably be called guilt – her heart seizes up, her fingers go numb, and she feels a terrible, terrible pity for her sister. Make no mistake, that wasn’t a linguistic choice to avoid typing the younger sibling’s name over and over. No, Joey really does recognize Jade as her sister in this small moment. It’s swift and it’s sudden and it hurts. She looks into Jade’s face from where it rests on Jude’s shoulder, then sweeps the hair from her eyes.

     They part ways at the front of the hallway. Jude goes off to Jade’s room, and Joey to the stuffy guest room in the opposite wing. Joey casts a look at them over her shoulder. She keeps looking at them until they round the corner and disappear.

     It’s hard to say whether Jade will remember this night, when her siblings have disappeared into the fray and she’s stranded in a valley of frost. If she does, perhaps the memory is tainted – both by time and the drippy molasses of sleep. Perhaps she’ll remember it as a dream, a hyperreal hallucination from the middle of the night. Or maybe she’ll look into the clouds of Skaia and see the same scene playing out again over the moon’s horizon, a smaller version of herself escorted up the stairs by her brother and sister. The same vision of the past, minus the exhaustion. Maybe Jade will gaze with wonder on the way Joey brushes her hair from her six-year-old face. Maybe she’ll feel love. But then, maybe she’ll wonder why Joey only granted her such affection when she was asleep.

 

 

     It is six p.m. on a Wednesday, and Rose is waiting for Jade to come back from fencing.

 

     Sometimes Rose doesn’t like to go straight home, so she hangs out in the Harley’s kitchen until she knows her mother will be passed out on the couch. Now that they’re twelve, their schedules are filling up with extracurriculars. They mold their lives around club meetings and sports. Tomorrow evening Rose will get out of the etiquette class her mother passive-aggressively signed her up for, but she will not find Jade lounging in _her_ kitchen – Jade actually likes being home.

     Jude lets her in through the back door. He likes having a Lalonde pass in and out of the house like when he was a kid. It’s hard for him to relate to her – her taste in genre fiction is pretty different from his – but he makes conversation anyway. He tells her stories of the editors he deals with, and she asks shy questions about how hard it would be to get into the publishing industry. Sometimes he challenges her to bring home the corniest sci-fi books from the school library she can find. On Tuesdays when Jade is working in Antler Creek’s community garden, they read excerpts aloud over whatever delivery is left in the fridge. Then Jude’s sister comes home, and the girls’ attention is swallowed in each other, and Jude wanders upstairs to watch The History Channel in his pajamas.

 

     Today, Jude is too busy to entertain. He unlatched the back screen door to let her in, then disappeared into the hidey hole he calls his writing office. Jade won’t be back for another hour or so. Rose drops her messenger bag on the counter and sits at one of the swiveling stools.

     A muffled sound of clicking claws on hardwood. Ah, and here comes Becquerel.

     The Harley’s dog takes a passing indifference in anyone who isn’t Jade. As he ambles by, he lifts his head to sniff the heel of Rose’s shoe. Then his ear twitches, and he keeps walking to his water bowl.

     Rose makes a kissing noise to get his attention. It always works for the neighborhood cats, but Becquerel is uninterested. He dips his head and takes a few bored laps at his water.

     Sometimes, Jude or Joey will reference an old dog the family used to have. “Tesseract,” they call him. Used to jump all over Rose when she was little, used to let her fling her arms around his neck and scratch his fur. Rose’s recollection of this is muddy. They blend together with the arrival of the new dog, and the two pets are equally big in her memory. Surely they must be different dogs – this one would never let Rose throw her arms around it.

 

     She puts her elbow on the counter and rests her face in her hand. A ghostly garlic smell lingers in the kitchen. Maybe the Harleys made _adobo_ last night. That would explain why Jude is rushing to finish his draft – he actually cooked instead of ordering pizza.

     Rose tries to remember the last dinner she ate with her mother. Dr. Lalonde cooks a lot – she calls herself a “catch” for knowing so many recipes off the top of her head – but Rose usually eats in her room. It might have been last Monday. It’s the only day Rose comes home right after school, so her mom lassoed her into eating in the dining room. Well, it’s not really a dining room. It’s more like an oblong glass table overlooking the bay window. Both the bar in the kitchen and all the living room couches are within sight.

     - So, are you liking the class? her mother asks over the rim of a glass of merlot.

     - You’ll have to specify, you know my schedule is simply bursting at the seams with recreational pursuits.

     Her mother laughs.

     - I mean the class I signed you up for! What is it… uh… conversational something?

     - It’s an etiquette class, Mom. We learn how to answer phone calls and what the difference is between a salad fork and an oyster fork.

     - Oh! Well, that’s good to know, right? _I_ had to know the difference when I was your age. Imagine using a fish fork during dessert… ha! Thought it was more like a sociology class. Ah, well.

     - How exactly does one mistake an etiquette class for a sociology course?

     - Now, don’t be rude to Mummy, she says in the fake British accent Rose hates. Dr. Lalonde pokes a yam with her fork and bites it dramatically. I only _ever_ took science classes when I was a kid.

     Rose looks out the window and watches an opossum waddle under the security floodlight.

 

     Rose’s stomach growls.

     “Psst,” she calls. “Here, Bec.”

     Becquerel lifts his head from the water bowl and licks his chops. His tongue is dark and splotchy, shades of black and what almost looks like green. She holds her hand out and snaps her fingers. He sits down to scratch behind his ear, then stretches out and trots over to the barstools. Rose rubs her thumb against her index and middle fingers.

     “Come here pup,” she coos. “How’re you feeling today? Catch any squirrels? Give any mailmen the old left-right combo?”

     Bec sits at her feet and gives her hand a weak sniff. She rubs the velvety end of his snout. He’s neither annoyed nor pleased – he just lets her do it.

     “You wouldn’t be giving me this attitude if Jade was here,” Rose grumbles. “You miss your friend, huh? You wonder what she’s getting up to, I bet. I think you’d go to school with us if you c–”

     It happens very quickly. There’s a feeling of falling through the barstool, like the terrifying moment in a dream where you think you’ve toppled over, and Rose feels her hand disappear. It passes out of the kitchen’s air conditioning and into a muggy, post-rain warmth. It’s the studio in Antler Creek’s third floor, an open window letting heat into the middle of a fencing session. Jade leans against the long mirror along the wall, tapping the edge of her epee against the floor as she watches two other students practice. The instructor says something from the other side of the room. Then the vision eats itself up and spits itself out, and Rose is back in the kitchen. Or, she was always here.

     She feels as though she’s been tossed through an electric current. A smell like kerosene and metal lingers in the air.

     There is a brief and solid second where Rose convinces herself that this did not just happen. Part of her wants to write this off as an eighteenth century hysteria, a moment of woman’s madness due to something like chill. This is the easy answer, and it involves no further questions, nothing to see folks, thank you very much. More importantly, Rose won’t have to ask Jade any hard-to-phrase questions that suggest she _might_ ’ve been wrong about Jade’s babblings. Like, oh, “my dog is the best because he can run all over the world” when they were five, or “I’m jealous that Bec can breathe in space” when they were eight.

     This is the answer that Rose chooses to accept. But then Becquerel yawns to reveal a green tongue, and Rose watches a long crackle of yellow and neon green lash across his fur.

     “Good dog,” she whispers.

 

 

     It is starting to get cooler in the evenings now, but Jade still insists on dragging Rose to the beach. Not that you could really call it “dragging,” anyway – Rose will go anywhere if it means Jade will take her hand and babble excitedly on the way there.

     Saturday is always the best time to go, when the sky is going orange and the crickets are starting to sing. No one at home will miss them for now. Jude will be holed up in his office finishing his chapter outlines before his “day of rest” – of which he has at least three. Rose’s mom, on the other hand, will be celebrating the weekend by downing a bottle of wine and watching HGTV. It’s like their own private limbo – they are invisible to everyone else, which means that no one else matters.

     The rock beach crunches under their shoes. Jade hops across plateaus of salty stone, her skirt bunched up in her hands. Rose gets water on her socks when she tries to follow. With this view, though, Rose can hardly stay mad about her socks. Everything reflects the sunset – pink and orange and purple paint the pebbles and turn Jade’s hair kaleidoscopic from the back.

           

     Behind them, seagulls are crooning. They flap their wings and peck at the pebbles. Probably at a dead crab. Rose stands with her sneakers in the low tide.

     “Have you ever been to a sand beach?” Jade asks suddenly.

     “Of course. Haven’t you?”

     “Yeah.”

     With her back to her, Jade starts to play with the length of her hair.

     “I used to live on the beach. There wasn’t a lot of sand, mostly just cliffs and stuff. There were these silty tidal pools, though, and all sorts of stuff would wash up. Like octopi and cone shells.”

     “I thought you always lived here?”

     “No, my old house was on an island. I lived with my dad.”

     Rose never met Dr. Harley. Even her memories of Dr. Claire are fuzzy, her face forgotten except for hallway photographs. She remembers assuming that Jade’s mother was divorced. With the dizzying amount of money Skaianet spits out, it seems unsurprising that Dr. Harley would retreat with their youngest daughter to some off-the-grid island. Maybe they lived in Florida. Old people like Florida, right? Living there would explain why Jade is bothered by any temperature below sixty-five degrees.

     Still, Rose can’t remember a time that Jade Harley was not a five minute drive away. But then, there are baby pictures of everyone in Harley Manor except for her. A number of questions spring into mind, but Jade doesn’t offer anything else.

     “Did you live in Bainbridge?” Rose tries. It’s the only island in the state she can think of that actually has a lot of people.

     “No, it was just us. I don’t remember having neighbors.”

     “…Portage, then?”

     “No.”

     Rose kicks a stone in the water, unearthing it and flipping it over. Dark, sandy mud sticks to the top of it.

     “Why don’t you live there anymore?”

     Jade starts braiding the end of her hair. The black flyaways glint in the sun. “He died, so I came here.”

     “Oh.” Rose fidgets with the hem of her shirt. “I’m sorry.”

     “It’s okay. I don’t remember him very well.”

     “Why’d you live there? If you don’t mind me asking.”

     “He was… on a field study, I guess you could call it. There was a temple nearby. He was trying to translate the hieroglyphs.”

     “And he took you with him? Why not leave you here? Strikes me as negligent”

     “I’m not sure.”

     Photos of Dr. Harley are hard to decode. He has an unexpressive face, occasional smiles reserved for family pictures. Candid photographs show a man who has yet to find out that it’s possible to stop working. In the hall where Jade’s bedroom is, there’s a photo of a young Joey sitting on his shoulders. The tops of palm trees are visible in the background. She laughs aloud with a delighted smile, but her father is focused on something out of frame. As far as Rose knows, Jude never accompanied his dad on his treks like his sister did. It baffles her that he would choose to take a toddler with him on a solo operation.

     “Were they… I mean, I’m sorry if this is personal….”

     “Why wouldn’t I answer anyway?”

     “Right. Were your parents still married?”

     “When we lived on the island? Yes. They both wore wedding rings.”

     “So you were... you lived alone. What happened when he died?”

     Crouching in the rocks, Jade watches pops of sunlight spark across the water. The chill of the wind tries to fight off the warmth of the setting sun. It used to be like this on the island, too. The salty air would chill and Jade would pull her sheets up to her chin, and the pillowcases would smell like sand. Jade doesn’t remember what her bedsheets used to look like. Maybe they were clouds, maybe it was just a quilt.

 

     Mostly, she just remembers fearing that the wall keeping her bedroom aloft would break off in a thunderstorm and send her whole room toppling down the hills. She remembers watching the panorama of the ocean through gigantic atrium windows, and flowers as big as her face. And she remembers the reek of formaldehyde past her mask, all the Skaianet machines that helped her split her grand— her father open.

     What happened when he died? What a loaded question. Should she describe the hours toiling over his corpse, or the four months and nine days of living alone?

     She remembers her gloves staining with yellow and orange, how monstrous he looked once the robots were finished peeling the meat from the muscle. She remembers her tiny hands pressing the same dials and pulling the same levers that her father used to taxidermy the beasts from the temple. It gave his skin form and substance again. The whole ordeal was slow, but he looked convincing enough once it was done. The skin down his temple was nicked in the process, and Jade sat on a stool to stitch it shut again. It was hard to see him the same way again. He was still her father, and he looked just as formidable in front of the fireplace as he did when he was alive. Something about watching tiny machines slit apart his dermis made her impression of him shift, though.

     “He was already dying,” Jade lies. “Probably just old age or something, who knows? He couldn’t leave by himself. My mom flew in to bring us back.”

     “I think I remember them being buried together.”

     “Yeah, they were. Remember how bad the funeral home smelled?”

     “Vaguely. Like mothballs and old people.”

     “Yeah.”

     Jade does not mention that the grave Dr. Claire is buried next to is empty.

     “Do you miss it?”

     Jade blinks. “Not really. Maybe just the weather.”

     “It sounds like a lovely place to live, if you had ancient temples to unearth so closeby. I could only hope to live somewhere like that.”

     “No, you wouldn’t want to live there.”

     Rose tilts her head. “Why not?”

     “It was lonely.” She shrugs. Jade finishes her braid, but with no hair tie on hand, she lets it loosen and unravel by itself. Then she looks over her shoulder, looking at Rose evenly.

     Rose thinks she must’ve said something wrong, pried where she doesn’t belong. They know enough about each other already – why go nosing around where Jade doesn’t want her? She feels her face warm with embarrassment. But then Jade smiles again, a soft grin that glows orange and pink and purple.

     “And anyway, if you lived where I did, we wouldn’t be together.”

     Rose feels a terrible, glorious weight press down on her stomach. The corners of her mouth twitch into a smile. Jade starts to stand.

     “It _was_ beautiful, though. You’re right about that. I’ll show it to you someday soon.”

     The matter-of-factness throws Rose off. Jade is always doing this. She slips some mysterious quip into the conversation and keeps rolling while Rose is tripping over mental questions. Maybe it’s innocent, maybe it’s meant to keep her on her toes. It’s confusing and maddening, and it’s only one of the reasons Rose hangs on Jade’s every word.

 

     Jade stoops to pick up a flat rock, then tosses it a couple times in her palm. She winds her arms back, curls her fingers, and flings it across the water. It skips several times before disappearing, leaving rainbow ripples in its wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inb4 jude is skrillex
> 
> i dont plan on covering a whole lot of the sburb session in this, but this au will fuck a lot more with canon than anticipated. notice how no one found jades dream self in the attic? hmmm, wonder how that will impact things...... among other divergences thatll have to take place......


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (kneading temples) i used google translate in part of this.... please forgive me....

     It is another lazy Sunday.

     April rain spatters Jade’s window. As if playing along to the beat of the raindrops, Rose’s knitting needles click away from the beanbag in the center of the room. Chck, chck, chck – plastic slides against plastic. Rose yawns and readjusts her slouching knitting bag. The easy rhythm of it all lulls Jade into a contented sleepiness.

     “What’re you working on this time?” Jade asks past a contagious yawn. She flips her pillow to the cool side.

     “Birthday present for John,” answers Rose distractedly. “Thought he’d want me to use his gift for something more than pot holders and cozies.

     “Well, _I_ like the pot holders.”

     “That’s because you have taste.”

     It’s mesmerizing to watch Rose knit. Not a week after she’d bootlegged a gigabyte of knitting tutorial PDFs, she was lashing swaths of silky yarn into thick scarves and blankets, all striped and zig-zagged. It isn’t enough for her to master a new craft – she has to be the brightest and the best. Jade admires this about her. But then again, it also makes the hiccups in her projects that much more of a big deal. Rose sighs dramatically when she loops a string of yarn incorrectly, unraveling it from the needle as though she’s been horribly set back.

     Well, at least John’s gift is being put to good use.

     Exchanging presents among their clique is always sort of a production. “Always” is an overstatement though; the kids have only just decided to exchange cross-country mail this past year. On one hand, Jade’s brother belongs to the tinfoil hat brand of the privacy paranoid. His personal website doesn’t even have a contact number for fear of revealing an area code. On the other side of the spectrum, Rose suspects her mom finds it cool to live in secrecy. Like she’s reliving her youth by playing a spy movie heroine. They rarely get mail that isn’t from Skaianet. The Lalonde’s home is even blurred out on Google Earth.

     In order to receive their gifts from the boys, Rose and Jade fed them the P.O. Box number for a Skaianet laboratory out in the middle of New York. It funneled through the corporate system until, _pow_ , they ended up on the Lalonde’s doorstep in Washington. Rose swiped the parcels before her mother could take her morning Advil and check the mail.

     The perfect crime.

     Jade pushes herself up by her elbows. “So, can I see what you’re making, or is it a secret?”

     Rose holds up a purple square of knitting against something on her lap. It’s hard to see in the gray light. She’s not really showing it to Jade, though – she’s just making sure that whatever she’s knitting will match up to the mysterious lump she’s modifying.

     “It’s not a secret,” replies Rose, “but I’m comfortable. You’ll have to get up if you want to see it.”

     “ _Rose_ ,” Jade complains.

     “Jade.”

     “Ugh, _fine_.” Jade pushes herself out of bed, shoving pillows out of her way. An orange Squiddle lands face-first on the floor. She sits cross-legged in front of the beanbag chair. “Okay, lemme look at it!”

     Rose picks up a greasy-looking stuffed rabbit and holds it out for Jade to examine. One of its glass eyes is dangerously close to popping out, and it’s covered in black and brown mats. Rose has already patched up a rough spot on its chest with purple and black yarn. The bunny gives a dismayed grin at Jade. She furrows her eyebrows.

     “Hey,” she says, “are you trying to send me a message here? I mean, I _know_ my rabbit is starting to look nasty, but that’s kind of what you’d expect from an heirloom, and _anyway_ –”

     “Whoa, whoa, hold on,” Rose interrupts, throwing up her palm. “What are you talking about?”

     Jade blinks. “The rabbit in my closet! Aren’t you just making a newer version of it?” She pokes the grubby fur on the bunny’s paw. “I’m impressed, actually. I don’t know how you found one just like it.”

     “Jade, I got this from my bedroom. I’ve had this raggedy thing for as long as I can remember.”

     They stare at each other. Her mouth in a tight, horizontal line, Jade pushes herself up and goes to open the closet door. There’s the sliding of clothes hangers and the rattling of neglected board games, and when she reappears she’s holding the finished version of Rose’s gift – if not a little worse for wear.

     “See?”

     Rose’s frown is a tiny pucker of black lipstick. She sets her project aside and hold her hands out. Jade tosses it across the room like a basketball, and Rose just barely catches it. Slowly, her entire spine goes cold.

     The resemblance is uncanny. A loosely-sewn lavender button replaces the eye that currently dangles from Rose’s version of the rabbit – the same button that sits in her knitting bag, waiting to be stitched on. Barely any of the original fabric shows through. Rose whisks her thumbs over the patches of purple and feels that the yarn has gone stiff with age. Little snags of yarn pop out here and there. Rose brings it to her face and sniffs one of the ears. It smells like sand. Without meaning to, she squeezes its body hard, and feels that something metallic nests inside. Rose gives Jade a curious look.

     “I thought maybe your mom snitched on me,” Jade laughs. She rubs the back of her neck. “I was going to enlist her help in changing this old thing up, too. Thought it might be cool to give it some AI! It’d be like one of those old robot dogs you used to be able to buy.”

     “A robot…?”

     Jade shrugs. “I _guess_ , I mean, if you wanna dumb it down. I’m kinda running behind schedule, though. Hey, do you think you could get your mom to bring home the rest of her supplies from work? She said she had plenty of the hardware to spare, and if I stay behind in the science lab this week, I could probably finish it in time.”

     “Jade.”

     “Hm?”

     “This doesn’t make any sense.”

     Rose stares across the room unwaveringly. Jade is _always_ doing this. She throws sticks of bullshitty dynamite into the conversation and stands serenely as the detonation of cagey mystery flings shrapnel every which way. Usually Rose can keep up, or at least pretend she can, but this crosses a line.

     “We have the exact same rabbit, Jade. They’re not just similar, they’re precisely the same. Does that bother you?”

     Jade bites her bottom lip and shrugs. Outside, a distant rumble of thunder heralds the start of a spring thunderstorm. The room dims.

     “Geez Louise, Rose, you _must’ve_ seen this thing once or twice when we were little. I think I stopped sleeping with it when I was… maybe six? That’s plenty of time for it to get ingrained in your neurons.” Jade waggles her fingers on either side of her head. “Maybe you remember it in your subconscious, so you’re trying to recreate it.”

     Rose’s mouth twitches downward. Jade can tell her words have made the desired effect – she’s appealed to Rose’s insatiable need for everything to have its proper explanation.

     “That may be.”

     “Yup!”

     Jade stretches her arms above her head and twirls on the room’s bright and fuzzy rug. Her hair brushes a long string of yarn that dangles from the ceiling fan – a relic from when she was too short to pull the cords. Rose watches the gray splash off the side of her face, then sighs with resignation and tosses the heirloom towards Jade’s bed. It bounces once and lands on its face.

     “Don’t get too hung up about it,” Jade says. By her tone, Rose can tell that the discussion is almost over. “Your soul leaves your body when you sleep, you walk a violet moon, you are worshipped by beetle people… what’s two twin bunnies in the grand scheme of things?”

     Rose purses her lips. She leans back in the beanbag, producing a long whine of pellets squishing together. Jade flops back on her bed and tucks the knitted bunny under her arm. It looks so much dingier when compared to its owner.

     “Anyway, do you think your mom could get me that hardware tomorrow?”

     Rose blinks. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

 

     It is not a great time right now for Jade to be dealing with Pesterchum trolls.

     It also isn’t a great time for a mosquito to be buzzing in your ear when it’s your turn to swing in a televised golf tournament. This is comparable to the amount of stress Jade dedicates to the twelve sometimes-incomprehensible users in her trollslum.

     It’s easy to block them. Lately, though, it’s been hard for Jade to make time for Pesterchum. Time zones are such a pain. By the time she gets home and finishes dinner with Jude, Dave is already passed out at his keyboard. John, while he seems to be from the same time zone, has a dad who actually enforces bedtimes. It’s distressing not be up to date with their daily antics – like, did Dave ever find out where his brother hid his entire sock drawer? Is John’s dad still battling the charges made by Cirque du Soleil? Every time she logs in and hears the ping of a new message, it’s a real downer when it turns out to be a magically unblocked troll.

     So she enlists outside help.

 

     Jude perks up when Jade mentions her troll problem.

     “Got ankle biters going after you, huh? Must mean you’re doing something right. These folks only go after people who have their heads in the right place.”

     “I wish the answer was that easy. I have _no_ idea what I did to make them mad. They just keep calling me stupid stuff like ‘load gaper sniffer,’ whatever that means.”

     Jude’s eyebrow twitches. “What an unusual thing to say.”

     He sits in his writing office, early afternoon light pouring in over his desk. Unlike the rest of the house – and very unlike its owner – the desk is clean save for a notated chapter outline, a Mac, and a cactus potted in a little jar Jade painted when she was seven. The circumference of it is rimmed with tiny, unevenly spaced smiley faces. Jade examines the wonky paintjob as her brother goes on.

     “Jade, sometimes people have a hard time talking to the ones they wanna be friends with. Do you know for sure they don’t just want you to _talk_ to them? Maybe they don’t… know any better?”

     “Oh, I’m sure they do. I think they’re all in it together or something, like they want to make me feel crazy. Like, who calls someone ‘human’ to insult them?”

     Jude steeples his fingers. It makes Jade uncomfortable, so she keep talking.

     “I mean, they’re more annoying than anything else, y’know?” She folds her arms and leans against the doorframe. “I wouldn’t say my feelings are hurt. But they keep unblocking themselves! It’s absolutely infuriating.”

     Jade does not mention that the trolls like to fixate on her skin. _That weird burnt color – did you molt or something? Why’re you typing in green if you’re just a puny brownblood?_ If Jude caught on that they somehow knew what she looked like, he’d have a conniption.

     Jude’s face hardens. “Have you changed your password?”

     “Yes, I’ve tried that.”

     He lets go of a subtle breath. Jude is always fretting over his sister’s online safety. It’s part of his ongoing role as a conspiracy theorist, but it’s also his most parental habit.

     “I picked up some tips and tricks from Roxy back in my day. Once, I watched her load our Windows 95 with a metric ton of viruses just so she could wipe them all from the hard drive for fun.” He leans back in his chair and jerks a thumb at his chest. “This guy’s got some hacker skills under his belt. Leave it to me, Jade – your troll problem will be _finito_.”

 

     Jade chews her nails and lingers in the hallway. The Mac has been shoved aside, and Jude taps away at his sister’s laptop. White pop-up windows litter the screen. She keeps finding excuses to walk up and down the hall and peer in on his progress – going to the bathroom and clattering in the medicine cabinet, rummaging in the numerous hall closets. Mostly, she’s afraid he’ll go into her chat logs. He doesn’t need to see the mouth Dave has on him, especially after ten at night, and he _really_ doesn’t need to see her calling those trolls all the words she learned from Joey. Jade has only ever been grounded from the Internet once – she got suspended on the Neoboards for calling someone a walking colonoscopy. She did not know what it meant at the time.

     Jude scratches at his ponytail and mutters something about IP addresses. He slouches forward to squint at a line of code, then makes a noise of disapproval and punches a few keys. The laptop makes a ping of protest. Jade sighs and retreats from the threshold.

     When Jude finishes, he calls her in with a cheerfulness that echoes through the hall and ricochets off each glassy photograph. Jade pads down the musty rugs on her tip toes and peers into the office. Her brother leans back in his desk chair, his hands resting on top of his head in the kind of satisfaction one gets when they know they’ve been very clever. He flashes Jade a smile.

     “Fixed it!” he chirps. “I think you’ll find your user experience much more pleasant from now on.”

     His voice is proud, but Jade detects an irritable twinge in his muscles. One of Jude’s legs bounces just slightly, the knuckles in his hands popping and flexing. It must’ve been harder to solve than he expected.

     “Was it difficult?” Jade asks. She goes across the room to collect her laptop. Her thumbs trace glossy stickers of vintage Squiddles and chubby shiba inus. She’s afraid to actually pick it up and peer inside. Part of her expects a Word document to be open with some sort of tongue-in-cheek about being grounded for life. Jade tries to remember the last time she used the F-word on Pesterchum.

     “Sure wasn’t! Nothing gets past this guy,” Jude boasts. “You’ve got quite a few proxies behind you now. Shot Roxy a quick message, too, and she sent me some Skaianet scripts to scramble your IP. That’s military quality right there.” He pulls his Mac back in front of him and thumps the lid. “If these guys bother you again, they must be Russian hackers.”

     Jade bites the inside of her cheek. “وأرجو أن يكون سألتها لإصلاحه.”

     Jude clucks with faux irritation. “Huwag gumamit na tono sa akin, maliit na batang babae.” The second language comes out of him falteringly. Jade barely understands it, and she can’t shoot back a retort in it, either.

     “ما لهجة? هل يبدو كما لو كان لديك عائقا الكلام. Don’t call me ‘little girl!’”

     “Then don’t _act_ like one!” Jude lunges from his chair and traps his sister in a headlock that’s more bark than bite. She shrieks with laughter and tugs at his arm, and since Jude is a certified weakling (brains over brawn and all that), she releases herself in seconds. He ruffles the top of her head, still laughing. Jade scoops her laptop from the desk and clasps it in her arms – a millennial Madonna and Child.

     “Thanks, Johnny Appleseed.”

     “No problem, Jeroboam the Second.”

 

     Jade exhales and settles into her bed cushions, her elbow jabbing a Kacheek’s face. A long column of yellowing light seeps across the room, but the haphazard canopy of green organza strung up around her bed keeps her shaded. Both of the boys should be out of class by now. If she catches them online, they can get up to speed with one another before it’s time to take her homework to Rainbow Run. Dr. Lalonde is getting huffy that her daughter is spending all hours out of the house. Jade has to make the downhill walk to the Lalonde’s if she wants to hang out with Rose today. Rose calls it political imprisonment.

     Still suspicious of her brother – a suspicion that whines with guilt in her gut – Jade opens her log of old chats. None of them have been opened recently. It’s a smattering of red and blue and violet, all half-opacity with age. She allows herself a small exhale of relief. Jade scoots her fingertip across the touchpad to close out of the pop-up, but then she sees that a recent log has been wiped from the history. She squints at the timestamp.

** Chat deleted by user – 20 min ago**

     Her stomach tightens. No one else has messaged her since then, no one who could have been the deleted party. Perhaps Jude was sending a test message to Roxy, just to make sure she couldn’t trace the IP from her end. Does Roxy _have_ Pesterchum? Maybe he was nosing around in her trollslum. Her chumroll, even.

     Jade’s worries are interrupted by a harsh ping from her speaker. It’s a grating hiss of a notification which lets her know that a troll has signed on. One of the names in the trollslum lights up. At this, Jade can’t help but smile smugly. _Let’s see you try_ , she taunts. _See what happens this time._

     And then the username flashes on and off, and a new message dings off to the side. Jade’s mouth hangs open. It feels like minutes that she slouches against the pillows, paralyzed with disbelief. Slowly, slowly, she reaches her hand out and opens the chat window.

 

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gardenGnostic [GG] at ??:?? --

CG: DO YOU HEAR THAT? IT’S THE SOUND OF ME SLAMMING MY TOUCHSLABS TOGETHER AT SUCH DEAFENING TONES TO BE HEARD IN YOUR MISERABLE CORNER OF PARADOX SPACE.

CG: WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF THIS MIRTH, YOU ASK? WHY, IT’S YET ANOTHER HILARIOUSLY PATHETIC ATTEMPT FROM YOU TO WASH YOUR HANDS OF US.

CG: HONESTLY I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD BE ADMIRING YOUR DETERMINATION BY NOW, BUT LET’S BE REAL HERE, IT’S MOSTLY JUST SAD. LIKE WATCHING SOME POOR SAP TRY TO CRAWL OUT OF THE THRESHECUTIONER’S DOME. KEEP WRIGGLING, JUNIOR, ALL YOU GET IS SICKLE.

CG: YOU KNOW, YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY ANYONE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU AT ALL. IF I WASN’T HERE TO REMIND YOU THAT YOU LOOK LIKE A SCUTTLEBUGGY DROVE PAST AND SLOSHED YOU WITH MUD, I DON’T THINK ANYONE WOULD TALK TO YOU AT ALL.

CG: YOU MIGHT BE BLITHELY UNAWARE OF THIS, BUT SOME PEOPLE *LIKE* HONESTY. YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE OUT OF YOUR SLURRY-SLURPING BAND OF MERRY MAGGOTS WHO DOESN’T GET IT.

CG: IF YOU COULD ONLY HEAR THE THINGS THEY SAY ABOUT YOU. SOME FRIENDS!

CG: AT LEAST YOU KNOW FOR A FACT THAT WE ALL HATE YOU, MYSELF HOLDING THE VAUNTED FIRST PLACE. MUST SUCK TO KNOW YOUR FRIENDS DON’T THINK MUCH OF YOU, EITHER.

 

     The anger that pours out of Jade is slick and acidic, like mercury leaking out of a thermometer. All manner of bad words come to mind, but Jade keeps her trembling fingers poised above the keys. It’s not so much disappointment that she feels – more like a hot and raging sickness that one feels when a suspicion is proved correct. If blocking can’t do anything, if changing a chumhandle and installing proxies and taping over the webcam doesn’t accomplish squat, then what can she do? They feel like a chronic illness, or like a cartoonish leech latching onto the skin with sharp teeth. 

     She imagines an older version of herself who has to turn off the laptop volume for all the thousands of pings of cruel messages that wait for her when she logs in.

     Jade takes a deep inhalation and lets it go through her teeth. Outside, an airplane rumbles distantly. Her fingers stop shaking, and she wills herself to type.

GG: do you ever get tired of hearing yourself talk?

CG: OH, THE GIRL LUNATIC DECIDES TO MAKE ANOTHER ROUSING COMEBACK! QUICK! I’LL GET THE REST AND WE’LL TAKE BETS ON HOW QUICKLY WE CAN MAKE YOU CRY THIS TIME.

GG: im not finished. we are still discussing how every syllable you type is like a 2D-printed migraine.

GG: if its anything like how it reads on a screen, i imagine no one can stand to hear your voice. that must be why you have to waste all your time trolling us.

CG: IT’S TRULY HYSTERICAL THAT YOU THINK I SPEND ALL MY TIME DOING THIS. DO YOU REALLY THINK YOU’RE THAT IMPORTANT? DUMB *AND* SELF-CENTERED!

CG: TAKE IT FROM ME, YOU FUCKING BUFFOON. TROLLING YOU TAKES ABOUT THE SAME TIME AND ENERGY AS IT DOES TO KICK A SQUEAKBEAST ON THE WAY DOWN THE BUGGYTRAIL.

GG: you know a lot about us, right? what we look like, what we like to do….

GG: are you obsessed with us because you don’t have anyone to talk to? take your time answering.

GG: really taking a long time typing, there.

GG: that was pretty clever, trying to convince me that the others dont like me. youre really thinking outside the box.

GG: not.

GG: maybe you have a problem with projection?? let me guess. you were going to list off all the horrible things EB and TG have told you about me.

GG: mustve been easy for you to rattle them off, im sure. i mean, you probably get the receiving end of those kind of comments every day. maybe you thought it would make you feel better if you convinced me i was as hated as you really are?

CG: DON’T YOUR FAT LITTLE FRONDS GET TIRED JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS? YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT ASSUMING.

CG: IT’S TWELVE AGAINST ONE, FROTHGARGLER. LAST TIME I CHECKED, THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO CAN STAND YOU IS A FOURTH OF THAT? AND ONLY ONE OF THEM HAS TO PUT UP WITH THE ODOR YOU NO DOUBT EXUDE FROM EVERY CREVICE.

GG: twelve friends who share a common interest in harassing strangers can hardly be called friends at all. i wonder what its like to be in a room full of you. do you have anything nice to say to each other once youre done being so hateful?

GG: hard to imagine imho.

GG: listen. id block you again, but thats what you want. you want to mash a sequence of keys and break out of my trollslum and gloat at me like youre a dog burying out from under a fence. im sure it is one of your few joys in life.

GG: lets pick up on this tomorrow, all right? i have a friend to hang out with. i wont bother to explain it, since the concept is probably foreign to you.

GG: stopped typing already? thats a shame.

GG: ttyl, CG.

GG: oh, and also!

GG: get fucked!!!!

\-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 16:46 –-

     She couldn’t help the last bit.

     When Jude asks again, Jade assures him that the troll problem has been fixed. She asks so little of him that it feels mean to tell him he failed. And anyway, it’s the thought that counts.

 

 

     It is shaping up to be a whirlwind of a Saturday. At only ten in the morning, both Jade Harley and Rose Lalonde are shredding their rooms to bits.

     Jade considers her room to be pretty organized. One could take five full strides before their foot finds an errant sock or the hazard of a _Pokémon_ bouncy ball. Jade wrestles herself into an athletic top and flinches as her phone makes a sound like glitter – the ringtone called “Fairy Dust” that she hasn’t bothered to change.

     “JADE!” Joey bellows from the foyer, “CHOP CHOP!”

     Jade pokes her head out while she pulls her hair into a donut bun. Her sister is using the voice that’s reserved for the hours before a dance recital, but two can play at this game. She roars back, “ALMOST READY!”

     The tennis match at Antler Creek commences in T-minus twenty minutes. She quit fencing two months ago – she felt stupid wearing the Michelin Man costume. While she stuffs her shiny racquet into Joey’s old ballet duffel bag, another Pesterchum notification lights up her screen.

     “ _Gosh_ , can’t it _wait_?” she asks the room.

     She unlocks her phone and browses through the last bit of her conversation with Dave. Sleep-deprived, he’s been up and messaging her since it was seven a.m. in Houston.

     He knows that Jade struggles with insomnia. An irregular hiccupping in her sleep schedule means that she lies awake for long periods, thrashing back and forth in her sheets until sleep crashes over her again. In and out of dreaming, like gasping in gulps of air while swimming a breaststroke. Jade suspects that Dave feels bad for tugging at her virtual sleeve during the sensitive pre-ten a.m. hours. The bright rectangle of the backlight aggravates her in the navy blue of midnight. To cover his tracks and appear less like a puppy trailing her down the road, Dave pesters her about the goings-on and whereabouts of their mutual friends.

     “Mutual,” here, is interchangeable with “only other.”

TG: meanwhile the garbage disposal is just spewing out straight sewage

TG: and the TV is blaring in the back i mean it is LOUD and Grizzle McThunderchunk is shooting up a warehouse or something, who knows

TG: basically it sounds like a war crime is being committed in this kitchen

TG: so MY ass is getting pummeled with bits of chinese takeout and firecracker wrappings

TG: im stickin a spoon down in there like a bomb squad rookie on his first day

TG: you wanna know what i fish outta there

TG: guess

TG: jade youre not guessing

TG: jade

TG: would you prefer multiple choice

TG: a) the top part of a snoop dogg bobblehead

TG: not including the lil spring

TG: b) a broken coldplay cd

TG: c) every second sock ive lost in the past two weeks

GG: oh my gosh chill!!!!!

GG: i thought we established that im in quite a pinch for time right now :P

TG: i dont recall that no

GG: :/

TG: anyway

TG: what i end up scoopin outta this bitch is this mangled soggy lil stuffed tentacle

TG: its got like... all these soaking bits of cotton all comin out of it

TG: so obviously the first question is

TG: wheres the rest of it

TG: i make these meaningful glares over to the couch but bro is lost in the Thunderchunk

TG: did not know he was into this fthluththulufu shit but i guess it makes sense for the sites in a weird fucked up way

TG: har har har “ive seen enough hentai” har har har

TG: god

TG: ive never seen anything like it in the apartment but like whatever it belongs to must be a lovecroftian nightmare

GG: lol you mean lovcraft??

GG: *lovecraft

GG: sorry im running down the stairs rn

GG: we are going to have to cut this short real soon dave im leaving the wifi in a min!!!

TG: so turn on data duh

TG: anyway

TG: was hopin you could get TT to take a look at this thing

TG: its sittin on a paper towel in my room

TG: like maybe she could scry into an obsidian washbowl and gaze into the grimdark abyss it came out of

TG: we can place candles that smell like citrus breeze in a circle and send it back to the sixth dimension

TG: then well be even and ill be immune from cursed cephalopods

TG: which i guess means TTll disappear from my contacts lmfao

TG: whats lalonde even doing today are yall pallin around

TG: doing hand to hand combat training while chatting about boys

TG: wait no

TG: boyz

TG: thats where youre goin isnt it youre off to earn girl scout badges in knife fighting and wiping fingerprints from the crime scene

TG: just gals bein pals

TG: jade

TG: yknow rose wouldnt play me like this

TG: every time you text her its like you lose the visual on her as she lunges at light speed towards the phone

TG: makes a guy feel bad

TG: damn its not that important lalonde no ones gonna get their panties in a twist if you take longer than 0.00005 seconds to respond

TG: you must not be paying enough attention to TT thats why shes deigning herself to talk to us lowly serfs

TG: your silence says it all

TG: damn i cant believe theres trouble in paradise

TG: what happened GG did TT try to wear the same dress as you to the 2008 lass gala

TG: did you decline her invitation to the skynet charity ball

TG: so now everyone thinks youre seein the pool boy on the sly

TG: clue me in here

TG: jade

TG: jade are you too busy with human interaction to reply

TG: god damn is this what its like to know people irl

\-- gardenGnostic  [GG] is experiencing connectivity problems! --

TG: jesus dick

 

     Joey barrels out of Hauntswitch at a speed which lays waste to the limit of twenty-five. As the SUV sails over a speed bump, Jade clenches her teeth and grasps her duffel bag.

     “Christ, kiddo, I swear you’re giving me an ulcer,” Joey mutters over the steering wheel. Jade can barely hear her over the radio. The Angelina Ballerina keychain that hangs from the rearview mirror (a gift from a sarcastic student) bobbles and twists in sheer terror.

     “Jude _said_ he’d wake me up!” Jade protests. “Blame him.”

     “Okay, first of all, _all_ sisters should always blame their brothers for everything that goes wrong in our lives. It’s common sense. Second of all, how hard is it to throw on a tennis uniform? You’re not exactly gussying up for Roxy’s Pretentiacon.”

     “You mean the trustee thing?”

     “Yeah, yeah.”

     Jade pushes her nose up with her finger and sticks her tongue out. “It’s always important to be stylish! Even if you’re doing nasty, sweaty sports. You should know that! Ballerinas are _supposed_ to look good.”

     “God, all right, I’ll grant you that. Took damn near an hour last week for my beginner class to pick out the recital tutus they wanted. We went through the same catalogue five times. ‘Raise your hands for the green ones, now raise your hands for the purple ones, Jesus Christ, Sandy, you can’t raise your hand for both.’”

     Joey throws the steering wheel to the side, and the SUV whips around the corner just as the light ahead turns red. Her eyes dart to the rearview to check for watchful cops. Jade begins to think she’s having a heart attack.

     “I don’t know where you get your style from. Jude dresses like he just watched _Wayne’s World_ and then locked himself in a basement for twenty years.”

      Jade places her hands under her chin and blinks cartoonishly. “I get it from you.”

     “You get it from hanging out at the MET.”

     “The MET?”

     “Roxy’s place. Y’know, how it looks like a museum?”

     “Oh, right. That’s pretty funny.”

     “You’re funny, too,” Joey says to the road. “Funny lookin’.”

     “You shouldn’t talk about yourself that way.”

     Joey stares into the rearview. “You get your biting humor from them, too. Shame you had your match today, or you and your conjoined twin could’ve made a game of ripping the toupees off those bastards heads.”

     “No way, those guys smell like metal and farts.”

     At this, Jade’s stepsister bursts into laughter.

     After all this time, Joey still can’t tell when Jade is being coy.

 

     On the other side of the universe, half a mile away, Rose is squinting in the darkness for her favorite bracelet. A thin slit of light shoves its way past the blackout curtains. The Skaianet Quarterly Trustee Brunch commences in T-minus twenty minutes. It is not a lass gala or a charity ball, but Jade was still not invited. She had a tennis match to attend to.

     Knowing she would take forever to flop out of bed, Dr. Lalonde crept into the room last night and laid out a respectable outfit on the chair by her door. Rose found the gesture unimpressive. As soon as she caught sight of the turtleneck and pencil skirt, she felt herself pull a muscle in her face she didn’t know was there. Truth is, she might actually have worn this outfit on her own – the fact that it was spelled out for her, however, rendered the ensemble appalling. She left the clothes where they were, flung the closet door open, and didn’t come out until she found her shredded No Doubt dress.

     Well, it’s not a dress, it’s just a T-shirt so big that it reaches past her knees. But it’s nice and holey, and the silver screen-printing matches her necklaces. The trustees will hate it. She feels warm with giddiness.

     Downstairs, the whirring blender coughs to a halt. There’s a creak of her mother’s heel on the bottom step.

     “DAUGHTER!” Dr. Lalonde shouts, “WOULD YOU BE NEARLY FINISHED UP THERE?”

     On the way to the threshold, Rose steps on the hard heel of a Mary Jane hidden under a pile of leggings. She curses under her breath. Rose pokes her head out the door. “YOU CAN TRUST I’LL ONLY BE A FEW MINUTES MORE.”

     Rose’s phone buzzes against the lid of her closed laptop. One ring, then two – the phone seizes across the clean, stickerless computer. At the same time she flips a purple ankle sock right side out, Rose peers at the abbreviated quips of Pesterchum messages which light up the screen. She does not take 0.00005 seconds to respond, and the visual is not lost on her in the process.

     John is someone whom Rose would call “endearing,” and this includes the dawdling urgency with which he pesters all his friends. Each chat with him is simultaneously the last time they’ll ever speak and a terribly time-consuming chore as Egbert the Younger attends to his own personal whirlwind. Rose would never call him endearing to his face, though. She _would_ , however, let it slip to _Dave_ , who would then call _John_ endearing to his face, who would then brush it off as classic Lalonde Original Brand sarcasm.

     Rose hops on one leg to slip an ankle sock on, then puts on a mismatching pink one. She pulls out her computer chair and sits to tie the frayed laces of her Converse, then swipes a finger to unlock her phone. Her passcode makes a dazzling lightshow across the screen.

     Just a few more minutes, yes, and then they’ll be out the door – and so behind schedule that she won’t have time to change outfits. Rose grins at her last few exchanges with John.

EB: so obviously this guy is full of bull shit, right? you can’t just speed run through the game like that!

EB: and even if you could why would you want to? it’s a GAME dumpass, why would you waste your time playing crash bandicoot if you’re just going to cheat your way through it in twenty minutes?

TT: Right.

EB: talk about booooooriiiiiing.

EB: blah.

TT: Blah indeed.

TT: Apologies for the delay. My mother grows antsier with every minute I spend up here getting dolled up.

TT: Though admittedly it’s hard to tell if the nerves stem from our dangerous skimming towards tardiness or whatever she put in that smoothie.

EB: it’s fine i understand!

EB: that was just my rant of the morning, ha.

TT: The rant of the morning continues to be what gets me out of bed each day.

EB: har har.

EB: also you’re the only one online i think? TG must be held up or something, it says he’s been typing for an hour or so now.

TT: As is typical.

EB: lol.

EB: where’s GG?

TT: Hard to say.

TT: I would venture a guess that her sister is barreling out of the neighborhood while inventing new curse words and laying waste to the 25 mph speed limit.

TT: While Gigi latches onto the back armrest for dear life.

EB: who’s gigi?

TT: GG. Autocorrect.

EB: oh.

EB: what are you getting dolled up for anyway?

TT: An event that my mother is obligated to attend, which makes me obligated by extension due to my being her kin.

TT: You know these kinds of events. Every guest over the age of 30 is bound by an unspoken rule to bring along the fruit of their loins.

TT: “Behold, the next generation.” Then everyone “oohs” and “aahs” while the parent stretches the truth about their academic achievements.

EB: hm, i am not too familiar with that scene, no.

EB: sounds fancy though! i wonder if there will be butlers...

TT: It’s possible.

TT: You’re not really missing anything.

EB: probably not. my dad sometimes goes to things like that i guess? he never brings me along though.

EB: which is a RELIEF because it’s probably full of creepy street performers with names like otis and bazinga.

EB: the flower center pieces squirt water at people, i bet.

EB: sorry you have to suffer through getting compliments from strangers and eating free food. :P

TT: I appreciate the condolences. It’s heartwarming to know that at least one of you understands my anguish.

TT: But unfortunately we have to cut this short. I’m leaving the WiFi soon.

TT: That, and my mother is pacing a trench through the foyer as we speak.

EB: oh no! i didn’t mean to hold you up!

EB: go forth and do whatever it is that important business people do.

EB: don’t forget to tell the difference between a salad fork and an oyster fork, lol.

TT: I wouldn’t dare.

TT: Talk to you later.

EB: bye rose!

\-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 10:11 –-

     Rose turns her phone on mute and leans back in her desk chair. From across the room, she spots a shiny pink belt that’d originally come with a pair of Limited Too jeans. The jeans have long since been defaced, but the belt will do nicely. Rose goes to scoop it up, then fastens it into place under her chest. It gives her potato sack of a dress a bit more form.

     This will the nth time she’s attended the Trustee Brunch. It’s all the same to her – faceless old people that smell like ammonia and lab coats, like they slipped out of the research facility in just enough time to sit down for French toast. They sit at a table towards the front, and a parade of people shake her mother’s hand and coo at Rose for getting so tall.

     It’s the slowest three hours of her life.

     Of everything, this is the one thing Rose does not share with Jade. It’s just her and her mother. Locked in a four-foot bubble of perfume and tight smiles. Rose resents the reminder that she is living in suburbia with a living mother instead of as the nomadic apprentice of a dark sorcerer.

     Sometimes she wonders why Dr. Lalonde doesn’t bring along Jade. They balance each other out nicely. She’s quick to warm to strangers, her smiles are never forced, and really, wasn’t her dad Dr. Lalonde’s boss anyway? Rose has no way of knowing why her mother would never tote Jade along to the heart of Skaianet’s elite. Imagine letting a test tube clone out into the wild, then dragging it back to be poked and prodded by the mad scientist’s colleagues. _What fine motor skills, what capacity for human language._

     Dr. Lalonde lives with the constant, crawling paranoia that those two will be found out one day for what they are: miracles of ectobiology. Skaianet records would tell anyone that she took off a year of work in 1996 for maternity leave. When she finished her paperwork, a nosy coworker studied her flat stomach with little subtlety.

     - We don’t have a husband on record for you, Roxanne, one of the data entry crones said. She eyed Dr. Lalonde over the rims of her Coke bottle glasses. Her insect eyes tried to pierce through her stark white shawls, watching closely for the sign of pregnancy.

     - That’s right, she replied coolly.

     The data entry crone stared.

     - Enjoy your time off.

     - I believe I will.

     Well, when you’re as brilliantly smart and ludicrously rich as Roxanne Lalonde, it doesn’t really matter if your daughter has a dad.

     In any case, Jude would never let Roxanne show off the spliced-up legacy of the late Dr. Harley. He probably thinks they’d keep her in a tube of neon green fluids.

 

     Rose’s mom is fumbling with a lanyard of car keys and security keycards when she hops down the stairs. With her iPhone between her ear and shoulder, Dr. Lalonde almost doesn’t register the outfit her daughter is wearing.

     “You ready to go?” she asks. She glances at her phone. “No, I’m talking to my daughter. Yes, we’re leaving. Well, tell him to wait!”

     “Ready when you are.”

     “All right. Hold this?” Dr. Lalonde holds her smoothie thermos out, and Rose accepts it.

     “Thank you kindly. Here, take the keys and let yourself in the car. I forgot to close the garage.”

     The lanyard soars. When Rose catches it, her mother starts to turn to the back of the house. But then she pauses. Her eyes dart over Rose’s outfit, starting with the mismatching socks and ending at the silver sword necklace she got at the mall. One perfectly arched eyebrow twitches.

     For a shining moment, Rose’s heart swells with the glow of preteen rebellion.

     “Well,” Dr. Lalonde says finally, “it’s important to be expressive, isn’t it?”

 

 

     It is a lovely day in Maple Valley, and according to Jade, it is a lovely day to take a different route home from school.

     Rose pulls her sleeves down over her hands and shivers. It’s only March – the cyan sky betrays how chilly it still is outside. As they walk under the shadow of a bare-bones oak tree, Jade offers Rose her sweater. She turns it down. It’s too big for pygmy-sized Rose, and if she wore it she wouldn’t be able to get the antique smell of Harley Manor out of her uniform. This is both a good and bad thing.

     Somewhere, a dog is barking. A little gold car sails down the sidewalk beside them and disappears. Rose squints to read the bumper sticker. _My karma ran over your dogma_.

     The sidewalk is littered with patches of loose gravel. It gets thinner as the easement moves in to swallow the cement, and they walk with their arms brushing. A blip of static fizzles between their sweaters. Rose looks up to say something, but then she notices that Jade is watching the houses.

     “What is it, Lassie?”

     Jade shakes her head.

     To Rose, this neighborhood is fairly pedestrian. The houses are stark white, formulaic with their driveways and balconies and shuttered windows. Like someone copy-pasted them all the down the block. This is not agreeable to Rose’s sensibilities. She likes houses that were clearly designed by their inhabitants, extravagant columns and cobblestone pathways and Victorian lanterns lighting up the garage. These houses fall just under “decent” on her radar. Rose kicks a pebble and stares down the next street.

     “It’s a ghost town out here.”

     Jade makes a noise of agreement. “Still at work, probably.”

     “I suspect everyone who lives here works a nine to five, yes.”

     “I bet they’re all accountants.”

     Rose snorts.

     Something is still _off_ , though. It twinges in both their shoulders and makes them fidget their fingers. This community is so devoid of personality – no decorations hang on the doors, no cars with decals line the driveways, no trace of furniture can be seen through the windows. If someone told these girls that no one lived here at all, they might very well believe them.

     But this is not what is bothering Jade.

     “I feel like I’ve been here before,” she muses. Her voice is far away. “Or, like I’ve seen it somewhere?”

     “Wouldn’t surprise me. This is probably where they shoot movies that take place in Anytown, U.S.A.”

     “No, it’s more specific than that.”

     The girls pause at the curb to look for invisible cars, then half-jog across the cracked asphalt. Jade stops at the opposite side of the street and turns back to look at a particular house. Rose follows her gaze. This house seems to be the only one that hints at a life inside. A ragged tire swing hangs from a low branch in the front yard, swinging slowly on a frayed rope. From across the road, Rose can just barely see the dim blue of a TV playing on the first floor.

     “Still no car,” Rose observes.

     “Must be a kid.” Jade sounds more distant than before. Her eyes go glassy. Rose blinks up at her.

     “I’m sure you’ve been here before. Maybe Joey drove through when you were late to school or something.”

     When she doesn’t respond, Rose pinches Jade’s arm. She squeals with indignant laughter and flicks Rose on the ear.

     “Yeah. Maybe.”

     Rose deems this enigmatic line of conversation over. She tugs on her sleeves once more and continues walking without her. Jade turns to catch up, looks over her shoulder again. There’s a flash of gray movement from within the house, and then it’s lifeless again. Jade bites her lip and hurries after Rose.

     What would be the point in asking? Jade has already had it drilled into her head – don’t tell people online where you live. That’s how the mothership finds you. Or so she’s told.

 

 

     It is a lovely day on Prospit, but that goes without saying. Prospit is always lovely, and it is always daytime.

     A hundred clock towers are chiming noon as if the time means anything. The guttural rings bounce off each stained glass window and reverberate through every arch in the city. A cluster of townfolk burst out from a bell-shaped door at the end of the walkway, their porcelain feet clacking against the cobblestone as they run to reach some overdue appointment. Jade swings her feet from the ledge of this bridge and waves cursorily as they pass. Beside her, Rose is a conspicuous blotch of violet.

     Back in the real world, or the real universe, Jade and Rose are conked out on the couch in Rainbow Run. Some nature program about cheetahs is droning on, and a baby gazelle is probably getting chomped on while Rose’s mom sits on the kitchen counter and eats green olives out of the jar.

     In the black of the Medium, the girls are hurdled miles apart. It goes like this: Rose swallows her fear of falling and leaps from the window of her room, then darts through secret alleyways and back corridors to reach the shuttle station without being seen by too many chess folk. The commute to Prospit is long and boring. The black goes on and on and _on_. She wishes she had headphones to drown out the sound of so many chess feet tapping against steel.

     Jade waits for her under the painted sign for King’s Square Station. After that, it’s time to socialize.

     “I’m anxious to meet that Queen you speak so highly of,” Rose complains. It doesn’t sound like a complaint, but Jade identifies it as one anyway. Rose fidgets too much to pass as curious. “You know, I almost feel like getting offended. What’s the matter, does Chess Mom think your little friend is a bad influence?”

     “The Queen is reluctant to meet you. It’s very. Hm. _Unusual_ to receive dreamers from Derse.” Jade pauses. “No, the word I’m looking for is unprecedented. She doesn’t know what to do with you.”

     “Well, maybe I’ll have a royal audience with my own Queen, and we’ll chatter away over tea about the silly idiosyncrasies of your migraine-bright moon.”

     Jade quickly crosses her ankles. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I know you haven’t explored much of Derse, but you should know by now that they have a different culture.”

     “Is someone being chess-racist?”

     Jade rolls her eyes. “Well, when the Black Queen gets a guard to clobber you over the head and lock you in a dungeon to keep you under control in the future, don’t beg me for bail.”

     It’s hard sometimes for Rose to tell if Jade is being sarcastic. “Would she do that?”

     “ _Psh_ , what do I know? I’ve never been to Derse. I value my life.”

     “They wouldn’t hurt you,” Rose says, though she isn’t sure. “It seems like a poor move in diplomacy.”

     “Like I said: you haven’t gotten to know your people yet.”

     The last echoes of the bells finally fade out. The sound of it is replaced by the babbling of the gold-flaked canal under the bridge. Far below, a Prospitian in a gondola whistles as they row towards the city center.

      “I just have a lot of questions.”

     Jade thinks this sounds self-evident. Who wouldn’t? Who besides Jade would be able to accept the reality of their being here? Who else who hadn’t been cradled by ivory doll-fingers as a baby, who hadn’t spent every listless night on a lonesome island dreaming on a gold utopia? Even as a carelessly talkative child, she knew what could and could not be shared with the grown-ups. It remains Jade’s biggest secret, ballooning to the point of unbearable until it could finally be shared.

     A lot of questions is an understatement.

     “Like what?” Jade humors.

     Rose smacks her tongue against the inside of her two front teeth. She tosses her head side to side, unsure how to get the words out.

     “We are not the only dreamers here.”

     “No.”

     It’s the obvious answer, but Rose looks defeated anyway. “Who are they?”

     “I think you already know.”

     This is only Jade’s guess. Rose is certainly nosy enough to drift across the black and go poking around in other people’s dream towers. Jade does wonder, though, why it’s only recently become an issue.

     “I thought he was awake. He was… lumbering all over the room, mumbling to himself and nodding his head and turning things over. There were birds. They shed feathers on his bed, nested on his shoulders. Pecked at his ears.”

     Rose crosses her arms and exhales through her nostrils.

     “I don’t know why I asked. I already know.”

     Graffiti is a telling thing sometimes.

     “Did you try to wake him up?”

     “No.”

     “Why not?”

     Rose shrugs. “The idea was considered. There were a few contributing factors to the final decision. One being that I think he’d get me banned from the Dersite public transport system. Two being that I like having these periods of silence.”

     To prove her point, both girls fall into a comfortable quiet. Jade closes her eyes and feels the cool cement under her fingers. It’s ragged with imaginary age, bits of yellow stone coming away gravelly in her palms. Further down the canal, a crew of laborers are hoisting themselves up a spider web of scaffolding. It looks like they’re replacing a buttress that’s begun to fail. A platform lowers the old slabs of stone somewhere far below.

     “Is it possible, one day, to…?” Rose asks. Her eyes travel to the other dream tower. Skaialight bounces off of it and gives it a soft halo. Jade follows her gaze.

     “That sounds like an invasion of privacy, don’t you think?”

     Rose looks shamed. Her lips thin. “Right, right. You’re right.”

     Another pause.

     “Why did you wake me up, then?”

     “Do you regret that I did?”

     “Wh–? No, of course not. I just….”

     “You thought I was lying when I told you. When we were ten. It would have been impossible for me to wake you up in person. I would’ve been putting my life on the line. It just took a while to figure out how I could get events to line up in such a way that you would wake up on your own.”

     “With the guards.”

     “Yes, that’s right.”

     “I see.”

     Jade pulls a candy from her shallow skirt pocket. It was a gift from a courier they passed on the way out of King’s Square, bright and green. She pops it in her mouth and returns the wrapper to her pocket.

     “I needed you to know I wasn’t making it up. It was dumb of me to expect you to take my word for it, but it hurt that you thought I was… I don’t know, seeking attention or something.”

     Rose’s cheeks warm. She remembers it now – the airless space under the quilts, the white light reflecting off her glasses, the confusion when Rose couldn’t detect a lie in Jade’s voice. The hurt when the lie seemed transparent, anyway.

     “I _should_ have believed you. You’re not dumb for expecting me to trust you. I never think you’re dumb.”

     Jade smirks. Her face twists up to restrain her obvious happiness. “Good, because you’d be wrong.”

     The tension dissolves in a shared laugh. A Prospitian in a cartoonish-looking hennin walks by with a stout companion, staring at the purple-clad Rose as she passes.

     “I’m flattered that you pulled out all the stops to mastermind me awake,” Rose says finally. “I’m very thankful that I get to see this.”

     Thankful and immensely satisfied. Rose looks up at the other dream tower and feels her heart swell in the way that must only happen to the protagonists of YA novels. Something has chosen these four kids, plucked them from their pedestrian lives, and has deemed them worthy of something magnificent and fantastical. It thrills her with each tiny, respectful nod she receives from the Dersites, with each glimpse of her own life she sees in Skaia’s jet streams. She may not be an orphan or a sorcerer’s apprentice or a curse-bearing chosen one, but something is brewing on the horizon which may make up for this current life. Something wicked this way comes.

     “There were other ways to wake you up, it was just a matter of choosing the right one.” Jade hops down from ledge of the bridge – a good thing, too, since it was making Rose nervous. “Oh, the blueprints I went through to wake up the Princess of Derse!”

     Rose lets Jade take her hands and twirl her around the center of the bridge. Jade’s yellow skirts rustle as they do, forming a short-lived cymbal when they spin apart. Rose lassos them back together by their single interlocking hand. She’s glad for the leggings Derse has given her – she thinks a petticoat would get treacherous on a moon with so many staircases. Jade pulls it off, though.

     “I could have hired _kidnappers_ , I could have called in a _bomb_ threat so the sirens would wake you up,” Jade snickers. “I could have thrown something into the tracks at the station so that all the delayed shuttles would arrive at once. You’d hear the horns for _miles_.”

     “Who knew you were such a delinquent?” They clasp their palms together and skip-hop airily down the bridge. Jade drains the gravity from her feet, and her ballet flats drift slowly back to solid ground. Rose is too anxious to test out what it’s like to levitate. “Quite honestly, Gigi, I’m scandalized you didn’t fight tooth and nail to the top of my tower, royal guards be damned.”

     “I can’t believe I passed up such a thrilling opportunity! I can see the headline across the Dersite rags now – Prospitian scum makes off with stolen royalty. The drama, the intrigue, the exclusive interviews!”

     “Would it have worked? Would I have woken up, is what I mean.”

     Jade mulls it over. They waltz in slow-motion. “Probably not. I know from experience. A dreamer who wants to stay asleep will do anything to keep themselves that way.”

     “So it would take more than kidnapping.”

     “Oh, well, there are more peaceful means. More fairytale means.”

     Rose is surprised when Jade dips her, gripping her firmly so she doesn’t slip. The tuft of her bleached hair almost touches the cobblestone. Her grip on Jade’s sleeves slackens, and she’s afraid she’ll be dropped, but Jade’s been pushed into too many athletic extracurriculars for that.

     “You can always kiss a princess awake. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”

     Strange, that Rose hadn’t noticed how close their faces are. The bright blue of Skaia is blocked out by Jade’s clouds of hair. She sees her own reflection in the circles of her lenses – wide-eyed and ruddy. Strange how she hasn’t noticed that Jade smells like saltwater here.

     And then she’s pulled back upright.

     The gold floods her vision. The dance is already over, but Jade keeps two of her fingers hooked with Rose’s. Her chin is tilted up, looking past cathedral towers and spires. Rose moves closer and follows her line of sight.

     “Look,” Jade directs. Her finger points at a trundling oracle cloud.

     These are Prospit’s main attraction, an idyllic and postcard-worthy version of the whispering, gurgling void which Derse offers. Bluish shadows reveal the past and present, the future and that which was never meant to be. They strike Rose as impractical. They offer the answers without any context. Unlike the horrorterrors – the spiraling tale to Skaia’s illustrations. It seems a bad idea to vocalize this observation, though. Jade has warned how enticing the writhing abyss can be. Dangerous. Like an addiction. The analogy was pointed.

     Rose squints to make out the shapes in this cloud. The intensity of the light drowns out the contrast. She makes a visor with her hand. This oracle cloud shows a flowering island in the middle of the sea, all grassy hills and salt-crusted cliff faces. A tower crawls tirelessly towards the ocean sky, stark white and solid. It overlooks a rocky mountain, which in turns overlooks the scattered ruins of a stony temple.

     “Home is the same as ever,” Jade observes. There’s something wistful in her voice.

     It takes a moment for Rose to understand her meaning. This is it, then. The home where Dr. Harley spirited away his daughter.

     “It never shows me home,” she adds. “Never the house we _live_ in. I don’t think Skaia recognizes address changes.”

     “How can you tell it’s the present?”

     “All the crates on the hills. The planes are still delivering rations.”

     Rose feels ill.

     “I told you I’d show you one day. Still think it’s lovely?”

     “Objectively.”

     The image in the cloud sputters out. It’s replaced the inside of a tower room – the Pacific can be seen from the massive windows.

     “The atrium,” Jade whispers. Her voice is fragile, wanting.

     Rows of pots once held flowers and vegetables, but anything it once grew has decayed past recognition. It’s all black, molded vines. Just before this oracle cloud is overtaken by a bigger one (white, formless, waiting for Skaia’s cue), the girls see the small shape of a dog sleeping under the windows. Soaking in the sunlight.

     “Becquerel?” Rose half-shouts.

     “He likes to go home sometimes,” explains Jade simply.

     Sometimes he brings things back, too. Jade will wake in the morning to Bec pawing dusty artifacts from her bedroom toward her sleeping face. Last month’s haul included a clouded 8 ball, a child-sized dress from the wardrobe, and a Manthro Chap with a nineties-esque uncanny valley face. Once, he zapped her back a mummy with a deer head sewn on. Jade hauled it up to the attic and left it there.

     “Have you ever asked him to bring you back?”

     Jade is startled by the question. She considers.

     “No,” she replies. “I’m not sure he’d take me back.”

     Becquerel has always been so jealous of his favorite human.

     The cloud disappears. A tension dissolves from Jade’s shoulders. Out of sight, out of mind. Rose can’t help but notice that their fingers are still entwined. When she leans forward to rest a sympathetic hand on Jade’s shoulder, she breathes in to smell the scent of sand and salt on her.

 _It was lonely_.

     Jade sighs very quietly and squeezes Rose’s fingers. Rose feels an intense gratitude too big to be defined.

 

 

     It is a teacher in-service day at Antler Creek. Rose shuffles out of bed at one in the afternoon, her fuzzy blanket draped around her like a cocoon. There’s no telling what would crawl out of this chrysalis – maybe a deep sea squid.

     Rose goes through the checklist of her online routine. She deletes the Pottery Barn spam from her school email (God, she only went there _one_ time), sloughs through the BBC articles she can understand, completes a LiveJournal quiz (who is your _Naruto_ girlfriend?), then does her dailies on Neopets. The Lupe that Jade made for her when they were nine – _SailorPlut0_ – ho-hums from the sidebar and asks her if she’s seen any good concerts lately. She hasn’t.

     Even though it’s November, Dr. Lalonde insists on keeping the house chilly. She gets overheated easily, either from wonky body chemistry or day-drinking. Maybe both. Warm air spits out of the vent by Rose’s feet, and she flexes her toes to absorb it all. The room feels cold anyway. Rose yanks the blanket around her with annoyed determination.

     The front door closes, startling her. Rose glances at the clock in the corner of the screen – five p.m. already? Time flies when you’re feeding pixelated food to pixelated animals. It occurs to her that a message from Dave has been blipping for attention in the taskbar for a while now. The pings of his messages grow insistent.

     Then the voice of her mother echoes, ghostly, from the foyer. It’s almost lost behind the door. Rose leans out of her chair and shouts back a “YEAH?” to the sound of her name. High heels thunk up the staircase. There’s a soft knock on the door.

     “I said ‘yeah.’”

     Rose’s mom pops her head in. She brings the smell of her perfume in with her, flowery and safe. There’s a possibility she uses it to sedate her nervous breakdown-prone programmers at work.

     “Snug as a bug in a rug, I see.”

     “Maybe just ‘snug.’”

     “You look like you haven’t moved an inch all day,” Dr. Lalonde laughs. Rose is suddenly aware of how frumpy she looks. Her mother’s makeup is never anything less than crisp, a perpetual state of freshly applied, and as her jewelry glints in the doorway Rose is ashamed of the contrast. She feels especially naked without her lipstick.

     “Have you eaten?”

     Rose thinks about it. “Yes,” she lies.

     Her mother looks disappointed, like she wanted a reason to roll her daughter up in that blanket and hoist her downstairs for once in her life. Then the look on her face is smoothed over and she’s all smiles again. “Okay. Well. I just wanted to let you know that I preordered the game you wanted. Pulled some strings at work to get us on the list – not that it was hard. Ha! Isn’t that exciting?”

     ‘Pulled some strings’ is one way to put it. Rose doesn’t know that Roxanne Lalonde actually works in the same department that developed this game – there are hundreds of little sectors in that company, after all, and why would Dr. Lalonde be interested in video games anyway? Her appearance is that of the CEO firing the marketing underlings, not the one overseeing game assets.

     In any case, Rose has only a passing interest in the game. Her last family in the Sims died when an airplane tragically crashed their barbecue party. This new one is supposed to be much more interactive – very hands-on. Rose is a fan of anything that successfully tricks her into thinking she’s being productive.

     Rose blinks at her mother. “Oh. Thank you. I’m sure it’ll be fun.”

     Her mom approves of this answer. She snaps her fingers and gives her daughter an enthusiastic point. “You bet! Come April, you and your buddies will be playing SBURB.”

     And then the door is closed, and her high heels are thunking down the hall. Rose sighs and settles back into her desk chair, burying herself in pink fluff.

     Digging her face into the blanket, Rose smells the lavender of laundry detergent. Her mom must’ve done stealth laundry earlier. Rose is terrible at bringing down her hamper before it’s overflowing, so sometimes when she’s out of the house, her mom will wash her laundry and then slew them around the room in the same mess they were in before. It becomes a game to figure out what is and isn’t still dirty. It also drives Rose up a wall.

     Their detergent smells almost like Dr. Lalonde’s perfume. Wrapped up in its scent, Rose feels the twinge of muscle memory, of herself in the concave curve of her mother’s sleeping body. It’s nighttime, and her mother reeks of red wine, but her clothes are still saturated with the scent of her perfume. Her mother sleeps with her arm around her, smelling sickly sweet. Rose’s eyebrows twinge, unsure if this memory was a dream or just hard to recall.

     Isn’t her mother so selfish? She’s not the one who’ll have the worst of it when it all finally happens.

     Rose tries to remember where she’s heard this before, surprised at her own internal thought and confused by what it might mean.

     A string of new messages is desperately pinging from Pesterchum. A bright red chumhandle flashes on and off.

     “All right, I get it,” she mumbles to the screen, and returns her cold fingers to the keyboard.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ffufucking FINALLY....... found the time to finish this. god damn. here ya go. happy thanksgivins

GG: hello??? john this is a time sensitive issue!!!!!!  
GG: i am not trying to nag but you really have to hurry up!!  
GG: i can literally see roses house smoking from my window. or where it used to be at least x_x  
GG: what a shame about all those trees…. i guess smokey bear was right all along  
EB: argh!!! sorry jade i promise i’m not blowing you off.  
EB: did you know that sburb is really crazy once you get into it?  
GG: yes john i am very aware of that after watching daves apartment narrowly escape fiery death!!  
GG: and i would very much like to not skirt so close to that myself  
GG: so because bec is barking his head off and because there are meteors bearing down on my home as we speak, i would just like to reiterate:  
GG: YOU NEED TO GET TO YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT AWAY!!!!!  
EB: okay okay i’m working as fast as i can!

 

TT: Hello again.  
EB: oh, hey rose. what’s up this time?  
TT: Nothing much, other than the imminent doom of my dear friend and your paradox sister.  
TT: How’s the server copy coming along?  
EB: i’m working on it!! this is actually a lot harder than i thought it would be. so much is happening at once!  
TT: Keep your chin up. Don’t forget that I reeled you into the game with a house half aflame.  
EB: okay i get it >:P  
EB: i’m on my way home now.  
TT: Our friend is depending on you. Hurry and get her in here.  
TT: Now.

 

TG: so hows the jade situation going  
EB: oh my god.

 

 

 

4/13/2009 1:32 PM PST

    It is an unseasonably warm day in Hauntswitch on account of the meteors falling from the sky. By now our little burrow in the Washington suburbs is well on its way to becoming one hell of an archaeological dig for those in the not-so-distant future. Three homes have vanished from their foundations in a matter of hours, and this might have made a sensational news story had there not been the pressing concern of the apocalypse. Skaia has finally fulfilled its prophetic promises to its spectacled princess, and at approximately 12:36 this afternoon, Harley Manor found itself nestled in the kind of snow Jade has only seen a few times in her life.

    Some things are left behind when the Harleys enter SBURB. Namely: a back garden wall old enough to remember Victoria, a mildewing mess of damp leaves from November, Bec’s unused doghouse, the skeleton of a tree house in the massive oak tree, the massive oak tree, a fountain sculpture of a horse man which Jude always called “a Persian relic” but was probably just bought at a shady art auction, and Joey’s minivan. When Jade’s stepsister realizes that the game didn’t bring along anything outside the edge of the curb, she spouts a stream of profanity so long that Jade almost gets out her phone to time her. The minivan would not be adequate for much driving, but it would have plowed through the underlings nicely.

    Ah, the underlings! What a mess they’ve made of the manor. Disorder, disgrace, disarray! Just a minute ago Jude chased a basilisk down the staircase and beat it to death with one of Dr. Harley’s golf clubs. When it died in the foyer, Jude climbed back upstairs to straighten all the picture frames it rattled. And in the living room, Joey is playing whack-an-imp with a cartoonishly large flashlight. When she finishes them off, Jade’s sprite will come in and swish away the grist with his ghostly tail.

 

    Right now, a shiny collection of futuristic machinery is clogging up an unused corridor of the house. Jade is just finishing up the code for a brand new rifle when she hears her brother calling from downstairs.

    “Jade!” His voice is distant. “The dog wants your attention again!”

    “Coming!” she shouts. When she hops down the stairs, she sees that Jude has tracked half-melted patches of snow onto the front rug. The brilliant white snow outside reflects off of everything and makes the house painfully bright. Suits of armor and polished antlers glint in the strong Skaialight.

    Becquerel circles Jude, flashing excitable shades of green and yellow. At the sight of Jade, he yelps and paws at her instead.

    Prototyping Becquerel a second time was difficult. Everyone demanded she do it, and do it _quickly_ lest she accidentally prototype him with a gun and turn him into a Digimon. In the end she chose a suit of armor. He looks cute, she thinks, like he’s wearing a Halloween costume. The metal pieces of his dog-shaped helmet clank with every move. Jade pets the little fur that hasn’t been trapped in steel.

    “What’s the big deal this time, Bec? We’re working as quickly as we can,” Jade coos.

    Sir Becquerel whines and bunts his nose into the crook of Jade’s arm. She starts at the cold.

    “I think our best isn’t enough,” Jude says. He’s pushed up the sleeves of his flannel, and irritated scratches can be seen on his arms from his tussles with low-tier underlings. “At least, he doesn’t think so.”

    An arctic chill blows in from the kitchen, where Jade’s thwacking of her Bec-piñata blasted out the windows. Bec half-howls.

    “Oh hush,” scolds Jude, “you didn’t even go to college.” At this, Bec phases through the door and bounds back into the snow. The green trail of his tail is visible for a while.

    Two Harleys and a Claire watch him go. When Joey speaks, her siblings both jump in surprise. Zipping up a mint-colored winter jacket, Joey says flatly:

    “Jude and I will start securing the house. Make it harder for the beasties to get in.”

    “I can help with that,” Jade offers.

    Joey shakes her head. “Go upstairs and answer your friends. We need to pick up the pace.”

 

    Last night Joey Claire showed up with a fat suitcase, a handbag, and two large bags stuffed with clothing. Seeing the flashlight for the first time, Jade realizes why the bags were so heavy when she helped her carry them up to the guest room. And seeing Joey’s dauntless battling with the imps, grunting each time she hits one as though she’s a tennis player, Jade confirms her suspicion that she wasn’t the only one who saw this day coming.

    It was early evening on April 12th when the grey van pulled up in front of the house. Joey waved from the lawn when she saw Jade peering out the curtains. Lugging her things into the foyer she cried:

    ̶  Jade! with uncharacteristic sweetness. Joey dropped her bags on the polished floor and took her sister’s face in her hands.

    ̶  It’s been ages and ages – did you get taller?

    ̶  I saw you last week, Jade responded.

    Joey ignored this and hugged her close to her chest. There was something very unsettling about this, the way she embraced Jade after years of shoulder-punches and noogies. And this hug reflected it – Joey nearly crushes her arms in her enthusiasm. She smelled like wood cleaner. Jade pulled away in enough time to avoid suffocation.

    Later that night when dinner was done and Jade was pulling faces in the bathroom mirror, she could hear her siblings conferring in the doorway of the guest room. About what, she couldn’t guess, but now she thinks she knows.

 

4/13/2009 4:29 PM PST

    It is a warm spring day on the Land of Light and Rain. Humidity 32%, chance of rain 100%. Iridescent light bounces off of every wall in the Lalonde’s home and makes the white painful to look at. An undead cat is making a mess downstairs of last night’s salmon, a pile of new dresses is taking up space on Rose’s bed, and neither Lalonde is anywhere to be found.

    What they say about parental supervision is true. In a matter of hours, Lalonde the Younger has torn out half of her planet, befriended a number of aliens, unsuccessfully blocked a white-texting FBI most wanted, gotten slam-dunked with memories of a horrific timeline courtesy of her feathery paradox brother, and acquired a coven of small amphibians.

    Where did our Seer go? Ah, right, we have third person omniscient under our belts!

    Rose has taken up her studies on the Land of Heat of Clockwork. Sweat beads on her temples and makes her crystal ball condensate in her palm. The pages of her spell books are going limp. A pink turtle at her feet makes a pitiful noise of complaint. Rose pays no mind to her wizardly apprentice, however, on account of the chat window blipping new messages onto her screen.

GG: rose please dont think that im demanding you ask permission for everything you do  
GG: but your plan doesnt sit well with me at all!!  
GG: we have already talked about this. sburb is absolutely unwinnable without all of us working in sync  
TT: The game is unwinnable regardless.  
GG: rose… :/  
TT: Utilizing my dream self would cause no harm to my own person. You’ve confirmed this for yourself, haven’t you?  
GG: yes rose, thank you for chalking up my fiery dream death in your “pro” column of reasons why you should be doing this  
TT: …  
TT: I’m sorry, Gigi. That was inappropriate. I know you miss Prospit already, as do I.  
TT: I feel a little foolish for being mournful. The yellow dress was a very good look.  
GG: yeah it really was. but…????  
TT: … But the theoretical sacrifice of my dream avatar would be just that. A compromise for the greater good of the session.  
TT: It strikes me as convenient that the game has provided us with more than one “life.” What better use for an extraneous one than this?  
GG: i dont think youre getting the full picture  
GG: the longer you busy yourself steering your dream self around on a crazy suicide mission, the longer you put the rest of us at risk by not paying attention to your waking self!!  
GG: this session is kind of like a three legged race. except theres like, eight legs instead.  
GG: we need to work together or we are gonna EAT SHIT!!!  
TT: Five.  
GG: ???  
TT: It would be a five-legged race. You’re forgetting that our extremities would be tied together.  
GG: rose this is not the time for non sequiturs.  
GG: and in any case i dont think i can go on working like normal knowing that somewhere youre about to off yourself  
GG: even if youll wake up and be okay  
GG: dont you think thats morbid?? dont you think maybe youre going too far?  
GG: rose???  
GG: please answer me :/  
TT: Something has come up.  
TT: I don’t think.  
TT: I think I’ll have to talk to you later.  
GG: whats wrong??? can i help?  
TT: No.  
TT: Jade.  
GG: what??  
TT: My mom just died.

4/13/2009 1:09 PM PST

    A massive battleship emblazoned with a certain old man’s face is currently sailing through the Medium. The crew of this ship is sparse. Poking around in the cafeteria for cake mix is a bald man in a fedora. And up on deck is Dr. Jacob Harley and his protégé, Dr. Roxanne Lalonde. Next stop: the Battlefield.

    “This will have to be your stop up here, Roxanne,” Dr. Harley says. “The _Battalion_ needs to return to port soon. Back to Earth’s waters. Antigravity tampers with its engines.” He straightens his pith helmet.

    Roxy left the ectobiology lab with all the servers booted up and the coordinates tapped in – just like he left it all planned out in his notebooks – and when she emerged from the lab the _Battalion_ was waiting. What had she expected? Not this. She expected to return to her daughter, to protect her, maybe even to search for that second meteor child her DNA had given life to. She did not expect a visit from the deceased. For a while she stood in the mouth of the doorway, staring dumbly as her pink scarf whipped around her, and then Dr. Harley called to her from the deck.

      ̶ Roxanne! , he shouted. Climb aboard! The Battlefield awaits us!

    It has been a challenge not to cry. Roxy does not want to ruin her mascara.

    “How are you here right now? How are be able to meet like this?” Dr. Lalonde now asks, staring in awe at her almost-but-not-quite-father. The deep lines in his face crinkle as he smiles, the kind of grin he only gave when there was something new to be discovered. It’s hard to age him. His brown hands are still calloused and traced with veins. His moustache is still white, twitching like a caterpillar each time he speaks.

    “It’s a stunning place, Roxanne.” He pauses, and Roxy thinks he’s ignored the question. Then, “The flow of time is altered here.” He points at a golden satellite he called _Prospit_. It orbits their destination in fractured bits – something has severed its chain and sent its moon into the Battlefield. “When I return to the transportalizer pad, it will be as if I’ve never left. It will be 1999 again, and _you_ will be safe in New York without the slightest knowledge that we just spoke.” He pauses. “I think this will be my last time here. The timeline has come too close to the end.”

    “I never moved, actually,” Roxy replies sheepishly.

    “Hm?”

    She examines her pink acrylic nails. “It was too hard to leave. I didn’t think they could handle it. It worked out for the best, I think.”

    At this, Dr. Harley goes quiet. “The children,” he says at last. His voice is low and thoughtful. “How are they holding up these days?”

    Dr. Lalonde laughs. Tucking her hair behind her ear she says, “They’re great. They’re doing really, really well.”

    “And Alice?”

    The corners of her mouth twitch before she catches herself. “Still kicking.”

    He smiles approvingly. “I’m sending the children mail this month. I know they don’t get excited about these things as I do, but, well.” He goes pensive.

    “They love to hear from you,” Roxanne reassures. “Doesn’t really matter what you write. They admire you so much.”

    For a while they stand in silence. The Battlefield is brighter now, vivid hues of blue and white, and all at once Roxanne thinks she understands why her mentor left them all the way he did. What suburban family could ever outweigh this otherworldly sight, where planets are made of gold and time flows backwards and sideways? She feels like a child again, anxious and fussy that Dad has left her on the boat while he explores an ancient crypt. Roxy worries her bottom lip with her thumb, and a bit of dark lipstick comes away on her skin.

    “Why did you take Jade away?” she asks suddenly. “Why not raise her with your children?”

    She expects this question to ruffle him, but he doesn’t react. Straightening his lapel he says simply, “There are certain conditions which make children better adapted to play this game. It chooses those likely to succeed. Taking Jade to that island replicates an ideal childhood which will encourage certain traits in her. Adaptability, endurance, a disconnection from the fragile human need for interaction. She’ll be more efficient for it.”

    This last part chills Roxy. She tugs her black sleeves over the tops of her hands. How could he possibly know? How could he imagine the face of that scared little girl hiding under the table?

    “I don’t think it’s fragile,” she protests weakly. “I don’t think it’s weakness to want the love and company of other people.”

    “In this game, my dear, it is.”

    There is no other word to describe how Roxanne feels. Simply put, she’s sad. Sad that Dr. Harley left her, sad that science was more important to him than them, sad that Jude and Joey had to figure that out for themselves, sad that she’s getting the chance now to ask all the questions she still has for him, and sad that she can’t bring herself to ask any of them.

    “Do you think she’ll be happy?” she asks lowly. It’s almost a mumble.

    “She _is_ happy,” he responds. “Happy and loved. I think this makes up for lack of neighbors.”

    “But will she always be happy? Won’t she grow up lonely?”

    For the first time, Dr. Harley looks confused. He blinks and pushes up his spectacles. “Why, Roxanne, what a curious question. If you suspect I’m too senile for childcare, you could have told me upfront.”

    A rare joke. Roxy forces herself to smile. She pushes her resentment to the backburner, pushes down the impulse to tell Dr. Harley that his experiment on Jade’s childhood failed. That she’s safe at home, that her siblings love her, that she was given a second chance. That she will win this game without sacrificing her humanity. Hot tears sting in her eyes.

    “Roxanne,” Dr. Harley exclaims. “What in the world is the matter?”

    His concern looks more like detached interest. Like spotting something odd under a microscope. She laughs a wet, choking laugh, and all at once her mascara is ruined. She wipes her tears away and holds onto the deck railing.

    “I just missed you,” she says. “Look at me, crying like a kid again! I missed you so much. I’m sorry.”

    “Ah, well, you were always better than most kids,” Dr. Harley sighs. “I never had a better travel partner.”

    He puts an arm around Roxy for just a moment, squeezing her shoulder. She rests her cheek on him, remembering all the many times they have played through this aloof display of affection before. He still smells the same – dirt and yellowed newspaper and tea leaves. Roxy closes her eyes and imagines that she is young again, the little girl still calling Dr. Harley her father without any consideration for his reaction.

    Next stop, the Battlefield.

 

 

4/13/2009 5:31 PM PST

    It took a lot of convincing and a little bit of bribing to persuade Rose to come home. The snow has melted enough over the past hour to make Jade’s bedroom darker, and she’s grateful for it as Rose rests her head against her shoulder.

    “If I asked the Gods what to do, they would know,” Rose says quietly. Her eyes are bloodshot, face streaked with dried tears.

    “I think you’ve had enough Black Sabbaths for today,” Jade sighs. She rests her cheek on the top of Rose’s head. “I know I’m biased, but I have never known eldritch abominations to be trustworthy.”

    Her hands twitch as if her crystal ball is still in them. “I could petition for their help. I might be able to beat him.”

    “He” happens to be downstairs. Right now Jack Noir is in the kitchen being fed turkey giblets by a very nervous Jude. In the next room over, one of Dave’s innumerable copies has made a badly-timed pirouette joke and is now being taught the proper foot positioning by Joey. Another Dave is eating cereal on the front porch. More litter the forest. When they come back, they’ll fill the kitchen counter with more Tupperware containers and coffee mugs of little dethawed frogs.

    Neither of them are willing to tell Jade’s siblings what has happened.

    “I won’t tell you not to fight him, but don’t take out a paranormal loan to do it. You might not be prepared for the consequences, and what am I supposed to do if you’re stuck speaking in Lovecraftian gibberish for the rest of your life?”

    “It would make gossiping difficult,” Rose says. She doesn’t smile, but Jade can tell she’s made an impact.

    Rose burrows closer. Jade pulls up the blanket around their legs.

    “I should have looked for her,” she says softly. She has already said this line a dozen times before.

    “There’s no way you could’ve known,” Jade says. She has already given this small comfort a dozen times before.

    “I could go downstairs right now. I could get him before he goes back to the Battlefield.”

    “He might already be gone,” Jade suggests. Then there’s a loud bark and a flapping of wings downstairs as Jude thwacks Jack over the head with a magazine for trying to get into the dog treats. “Nevermind,” she says.

    Rose’s phone buzzes, and the screen lights up with blue text. She glances at it without making a move to respond. “How do you do it?” she asks.

    “Do what?”

    “How do you pretend everything’s okay?”

    Jade pauses for a long time and exhales through her nostrils. “I don’t. Not really.”

    A watch in Jade’s closet beeps to announce whatever hour it thinks it is. Somehow, the furnace kicks on downstairs and rumbles underneath the floor. Jade pulls Rose closer.

    “I don’t think you need to have delusions of optimism to keep going,” Jade thinks aloud. “It looks bad right now, I know. But we are still alive, and there’s still so much to do before we know for sure that anything is hopeless! So as long as our friends still need me, I’ll keep working.”

    Rose climbs out of bed. She walks to the bay window, which overlooks the thawing forest. The ground outside is strewn with mud puddles. Jade watches the white of the remaining snow light up Rose’s profile.

    “Do you think she knew this would happen to her?”

    “I think your mom was a very smart woman, and I think she trusted that you would know what to do. But I don’t think she knew, no. If she did, she would have sought you out.”

    Rose closes her eyes and nods. “I think you’re right.”

    Jade pushes the blanket off of her and joins Rose at the window. She keeps a small space between them, just in case Rose doesn’t want to be touched. “Are you gonna keep tearing your planet up, or are your witching days over?”

    “I guess I should leave the witching to the Witch,” Rose says with a small smile. “Yes. I think I’m done.”

    “What made you do it in the first place?”

    “I think I just wanted to keep up. Maybe I was suffering delusions of grandeur. It’s hard to tell now.”

    Jade exhales. “You don’t have to explode planets and do dark rituals to keep up with anybody. There’s nothing to keep up with! I mean, look at me. I’m running around in the woods like a dingus, chasing after frogs!”

    “Creating a universe,” she corrects.

    “And romping around in the snow after frozen amphibians. Did I tell you why I changed outfits? A frog hopped out of my hands and I fell in the mud.”

    “You always make things look cooler than they are,” Rose laughs.

    “And might I just say, the planet-exploding was kinda awesome. It just comes with a lot of risk!”

    “I was wearing safety goggles.”

    “Well, I’m glad your daredevil days are over. My anxiety is cured.”

    Rose chews on her bottom lip. “Would it worry you, if I went after Jack?”

    “Of course it would. That won’t stop you, though, will it?”

    “No. It won’t.”

    Jade looks down. She straightens out a wrinkle in her rug using her foot. “Then afterward, will you promise you won’t do anything unless you’re sure you’ll come back?”

    She holds out her pinky finger, and Rose hooks them together. “I promise.”

    They stand in silence for a moment. Rose uncrosses her arms and looks up at Jade. “Hey, Gigi?”

    “What?”

    “Lean forward.”

    Confused, Jade tilts herself closer to the much shorter Rose. And then Rose kisses her. It’s a brief peck on the lips, just long enough to smudge some black lipstick on the corner of Jade’s mouth, and when Rose pulls away she laughs and wipes it off with the side of her hand.

    Jade blinks. Her chest feels hot and cold at the same time, and though it’s trite she thinks she sees stars. If Rose is as nervous as her, she doesn’t look it. Maybe crying yourself out like a sponge for an hour makes you immune to nerves. Then without thinking about it, Jade blurts out, “Thank you?”

    Rose barks with laughter. “You’re welcome.”

    “Is there a reason why you did that?”

    Rose’s cheeks darken. “Oh, yes. I’m rather embarrassed, though. I should have come prepared with lilies and Byron. What a woeful performance.”

    “On the contrary! I thought it was worth a Tony. Encore, encore!”

    Laughing, they kiss again. It’s halting and self-doubting, and they go back to looking out the window. Both would like to kiss a third time, but are unsure whether they would still have the privilege of calling the other a best friend. Perhaps they have entered a territory that takes time to navigate – time they don’t have. At the edge of the wood, a Dave is carrying back a soup container full of frogs.

 

 

    Rose wipes at her red eyes. “I need to leave soon. I don’t want John to be alone when he….”

    “… Yeah.”

    Rose straightens the pink sash tied around her waist. Jade opens the door and whistles for Bec, who trots down the hallway on the paws that haven’t dissolved into a sprite tail. He sniffs at the hem of her newly-alchemized dress while Jade coaxes him into taking Rose back to the Battlefield. He’s moved on to sniff furiously at Rose’s hands when they finally say goodbye.

    “I’m off now,” Rose says sadly. Her knitting needles are held tight in her fist.

    “Be safe,” Jade replies. “I don’t need to tell you how powerful he is.”

    “I know.”

    “There’s no shame in running away.”

    Rose rubs away her dry tears with her sleeve. “I know, Gigi. I promised, remember?”

    Jade smiles weakly. “Yeah.”

    “Goodbye, Jade.”

    “Goodbye.”

    A smell of electricity and metal, and then they’re both gone. Jade stands in the middle of her room for a while, tracing her lips with her pointer finger, then sighs and ties her hair into a ponytail. There is still work to be done.

 

4/13/2009 3:58 PM PST

    There is not a man alive who thinks he’s done a better job than Dr. Jacob Harley. His game is published, the session underway, and somewhere his granddaughter is fulfilling the fate Skaia set for her.

    Three hours ago, the esteemed Dr. Harley dropped off his sort-of-but-not-really daughter on the surface of Skaia’s battlefield. Along with her bald gentleman friend, whose well-ironed shirt Dr. Harley respected a fair amount. Now they’re off doing whatever the last two adults alive do while waiting for the world to end a second time.

    That is, they’re waiting for their children to come back before it all ends. What did you expect?

    They dawdled a while, both parties unwilling to let the other go. Dr. Harley pointed out a Prospitian palace on the next hill over, where they might find shelter from the approaching Reckoning. Roxy kicked the soil with the pointed toes of her shoes, asking time and time again if he’d be okay back in the Medium.

    – Yes, Roxy, of course. I’m always okay! he boasted. Roxy’s smile was pained.

    Dr. Harley saw Roxanne off with a brief hug and an amicable wave. She paused twice to look back at him, looking a little less unsure each time, and then the checkered battlefield broke up their black-and-white outfits and rendered them camouflaged. And then she was gone. He feels his heart swell with pride as she walks away. His girls have always done so well.

    And after the _Battalion_ started up and the engines roared to life, Dr. Harley flew low over the checkered battleground and found his granddaughter’s body.

 

    Back in the cockpit, Jade’s body is slumped over in a captain’s chair. Her head rests on her shoulder, satiny folds of yellow spilling out of the chair and swallowing her legs. Doctor Rappaccini’s daughter, collapsed in the private garden. Perhaps to torment himself, Dr. Harley keeps glancing back at this fragile shell of his granddaughter. How trite that he wishes he could have rescued her.

    With the _Battalion_ set on autopilot, Dr. Harley crouches in front of Jade to assess the damage. The body is salvageable, he thinks. It will not be hard to preserve it. Should he let her keep the dress? Yes – he believes so. He removes her glasses, though, which have hairline cracks in the lenses. He’ll replace the glass at home. Dr. Harley hopes that the living version of his child will still be sound asleep when he returns. Wouldn’t want to upset her.

    This Jade is older – eleven years so. She takes after her mother, he thinks, except for the dark freckles she picked up from him. He remembers when Jane had hair that long, back before she went through her rebellious phase and cut it all off with kitchen shears. What a tongue-lashing she got for that! It’s a shame that they’ll never meet again. Yes, this Jade is her mother through and through. Not like his boys.

    Dr. Harley got only the slightest look at Jade’s brother. The meteor that was out of his control, another child he wasn’t meant to stick around for. It’s hard to tell how much the boy resembles himself. His eyesight, after all, was never very good, and the boy was standing _so_ far away.

    They cross paths on the Land of Wind and Shade, where the child is clambering around in a smart blue suit and Dr. Harley is completing some last housekeeping tasks. He looks like Jude, Dr. Harley thinks. The same long, almost hooked nose, the same skin color, same tussled black hair that grows in uneven tufts. And yet it’s possible to see how he resembles his twin. They have a curious look in their wide eyes, a slight gaping of the mouth like they’re about to ask a question. He feels the impulse to raise his hand, to introduce himself, but there would be no logic in this. The boy has a real father who loves him – a father who wears crisp fedoras and well-pressed dress shirts and has probably never been abroad in his life. So he disappears into the wood.

    John looked like a good kid. He would have gotten along with Jude, Dr. Harley thinks.

    The _Battalion_ hiccups as it passes into the gravitational field of Prospit. Jade is jostled and falls forward, and Dr. Harley catches her by the shoulders. He straightens her up again and brushes the hair out of her smoke-smudged face.

    “There, there, we’re almost home,” he says quietly, tucking her glasses into his jacket pocket. “I’ll get you out of here soon.”

 

 

4/13/2009 6:29 PM PST

    Jade is still rubbing blood off of her hands when the Genesis Frog is born.

    It’s amazing to her that after reading all of Jude’s pulp horror drafts, she still isn’t ready for the sight of Dave’s body. It stays with her in the back of her mind, blood and gore and a smell like pennies, and yet she forces herself not to cry. Rose is still out there, and if she needs help Jade wants to be intelligible. No use blubbering now.

 

    Joey has made an art out of shuffling awkwardly around the situation. Like a parent helping their kid with a crafting project, they stood in the kitchen together and moved the wet frogs into an ancient fish tank they found in the basement.

    – Do you… wanna talk about it? Joey asked at last. She wiped frog slime off on her leggings.

    Jade stopped. Outside the shattered windows, LOFAF was getting humid. Lavender hummingbirds flitted between the flowers above the sink.

    – No, I don’t think so, Jade responded. Not yet.

    A blue frog ribbited in her hands. Their _aliveness_ made Jade squirm. They remind her of the waxy frogs they had to dissect last semester, all pinned in X shapes like flayed men. Feeling their hiccupping organs against her skin was disturbing.

    – I, uh. I didn’t know you… had such a social circle, Joey starts. Didn’t know you had gentlemen friends, either.

    – Um… yeah. I did. _Do_. I do.

    Cue the awkward silence. Joey plopped an orange frog into the tank, where it hopped wetly onto a yellow one and splayed out all its sticky toes. With her hands still grubby, Joey patted Jade’s arm.

    – Well. I’m here, okay? Joey squeezed her sister’s shoulder, and Jade nodded.

    – Thank you. Really. Thank you.

    And then they returned to the frogs.

 

    Let’s return to the present. Oh, but Jade has disappeared!

    Ah, nevermind, let’s rescind that statement. Of course she’s at home! Harley Manor has merely been built up to Babylonian heights, and some unoccupied Dave has turned the house into a spiraling tower of tasteful columns and grimacing gargoyles. _House Hunters,_ eat your heart out.

    At the top of the house, Jack Noir is licking his chops after a hearty meal of kibble and chicken breasts from the fridge. Past the blipping of the supercomputer’s servers, the only thing to be heard is Jack’s nails scratching on the slate roof tiles. He is blithely unaware of what he has done to upset Jade this past hour – or willfully ignorant. Instead he seeks her attention with whines and bunts of his snout into her hands. The real Bec, put off by this imposter, has gone off to explore the Medium. Jade isn’t sure if even a dog whistle would bring him back now.

    All attempts to contact half of her team has come to nothing. It is now up to Jade to birth a tadpole of a universe before everything crunches into a singular point of nothingness – all while hoping that the children of Derse haven’t met with a terrible end. As one might imagine, it’s sort of a stressful position to be in.

    Jack sniffs at the Genesis Frog’s apparatus as Jade punches in the last codes on its touchscreen. A colorful mess of frog DNA is sloshing around in a tall glass jar, and based on her limited high school understanding of genetics, Jade is unsure how this will transmogrify into a fully-formed universe.

    But nothing in this game should be possible anyway, so Jade has stopped thinking about it.

    At the bottom of the jar, a drain opens up and sucks in the murky liquid. The last of it tornadoes into the opening and leaves a residue at the bottom. Jade pulls a switch, and with a loud clank the inside of the supercomputer begins to heat up. Jade steps away from it and bumps into Jack, who yelps and licks his nose. They watch rows of binary code flash down the touchscreen, and when it seems that the computer might explode under the weight of its own effort, a panel opens up and a silvery tadpole flops out.

    Jade pushes the growling Jack out of the way and lunges at the Genesis Frog. It’s iridescent and flashy, its skin shimmering different shades each time it wriggles. It looks up at its creator with slimy eyes that blink red and blue and green and violet. Jade kicks an empty 8-ball towards her and persuades the tadpole inside, its little underdeveloped legs kicking off against her. A tiny splash lets Jade know that it’s safe, and then she screws the 8 panel back on. This is her friends’ escape route – little and slimy and trapped inside a thrift store find.

    It is just so underwhelming.

    A deep and visceral cracking from somewhere in the Medium. Jade looks up and brushes the hair out of her face. An explosion of auroras is whiplashing across the sky, winking yellow and red with the aftermath of what John has done to the Beat Meta. The Scratch is underway.

    Oh, but something else is up there. Jade squints, but it’s too hard to make out. Then her phone vibrates inside her pocket.

CG: I'M GOING TO TAKE YOUR LACK OF RESPONSE AS TACIT VERIFICATION.  
CG: ALSO  
CG: THIS PRETTY MUCH HAS TO BE THE LAST CONVERSATION WE HAVE, RIGHT?  
CG: YOUR TIMELINE CUTS OUT COMPLETELY IN A MINUTE OR TWO BECAUSE OF THE SCRATCH.  
CG: WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT UP THERE?  
CG: ARE YOU HYPNOTIZED BY THE FLASHY SHIT, WHAT THE FUCK.  
GG: yeah you got me, im a freak for flashing lights.  
CG: OH. I DIDN’T THINK YOU WERE GOING TO RESPOND.  
CG: I WAS ACTUALLY ABOUT TO TALK TO JOHN AND MAKE SURE HE DOESN’T FUCK THE SCRATCH UP.  
GG: oh sorry for messing up whatever heartfelt monologue you were about to drop on me. :P  
GG: im kind of distracted right now, though, between becoming a new mom and whatever is in the sky right now.  
CG: YOU MEAN THE SCRATCH?  
GG: uh.  
GG: no…. theres something coming down. like on a parachute i think?  
CG: ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU’RE RECEIVING TOP PRIORITY AIRLIFTED APOCALYPSE MAIL.  
GG: maybe…  
GG: actually it looks sort of like… shaving cream??

    It lands without fanfare.

    A massive block of aluminum cans coasts awkwardly onto the slanted roof, sliding precariously until its Carapacian rider ties the parachute strings to the chimney. There’s a brief standoff in which the two parties assess each other. Then Jack seems to remember something. He snarls and pulls Jade back with his gnarled paw-hand, spittle dripping from his fleshy gums, but it’s too late to react.

CG: WHAT THE FUCK IS SHAVING CREAM.  
\-- gardenGnostic [GG]’s computer exploded! –-

 

 

4/13/2009 6:34 PM PST

    Tick tock, tick tock, the clock is ticking down.

    Red and blue pulses and glows inside the Bomb, dancing across Rose’s face and obscuring the countdown with its colors. Inside the towering glass columns, stars and nebulas are blinking out, expanding, exploding, flatlining into discs and sputtering into only red and blue.

    Dave is the first to speak.

    “Do you think this is gonna work.”

    5:35

    Rose does not look at him. It has been hard to meet his eye after he thwarted her attempt at a melodramatic farewell. You try to burn all your bridges and vanish into the void, and for what? For your paradox brother to follow you into the most uncomfortable road trip of a lifetime? It all strikes Rose as very uncool.

    “That would depend on what you think is going to happen.”

    “Is it going to blow up, I mean.”

    “I can’t imagine the ominous wires and countdown mean much less.”

    “Will it kill Jack.”

    “One can hope.”

    “Would be anticlimactic as fuck if it short-circuits and spits confetti at us.”

    4:57

    Seconds move in slow motion. It is starting to set in that Rose has made a horrible mistake, and it sits in her chest like heartburn.

    “Dave?” Her voice cracks. Embarrassing. He pretends not to notice.

    “It is starting to set in that I’ve made a horrible mistake.”

    “You mean potentially setting yourself up to get blown sky high? Yeah, take a ticket.”

    “No. Not that. I didn’t tell Jade.”

    This time, Dave does not answer. Slowly, Rose lifts her palms and rests her face in them. She does not cry. Through her fingers she whispers, “She made me promise I wouldn’t do something like this.”

    Awkward silence. “Killing the big boss is a worthy cause, I think. She would understand.”

    “You don’t understand.”

    Somewhere in the void, an Elder God gives a pained whale song. Massive eyes blink in the slimy dark. Dave can be heard shuffling in his orange dream shoes. He sniffs and slips his hands into his pockets. “I guess I don’t.”

    3:49

    “We kissed before I left.” Rose blurts it out without thinking, and the glowing red from the Bomb hides her shame.

    “Oh. _Oh_. That… seems about right.” Dave pushes his sunglasses up and scratches behind his ear.

    “Is that all you have to say?”

    “I. Hm.” For the first time in their friendship, Dave is unsure what to say. Rose supposes this is an achievement. “What do you want me to say?”

    “I don’t know. I don’t know why I brought it up.” Rose grimaces and folds one arm under her chest, holding her face in the other hand so Dave can’t see her. “I promised her I wouldn’t do this. What am I doing out here?” She laughs wryly.

    “Well. At least you’re not alone?” She can’t see him, but Rose can tell Dave is cringing at his own cliché. “Jade and John will be like… ‘those crazy Derse bastards, so obsessed with flinging themselves on the same sacrificial sword that they fought to the literal death over dealing the last blow to the Big Bad.’”

    Rose almost groans into her palm. “Anything to take the edge off, I suppose.”

    “Yeah.”

    2:56

    “I was thinkin’ earlier, but, y’know something?” Dave asks. “We kinda look alike.”

    It’s an odd attempt at changing the subject. Rose’s stomach feels sour. “I don’t see it.”

    Dave sounds a touch crestfallen. “No, we’re not identical, but. I mean. We kinda have the same face, I guess. Like the same nose, sort of?” Rose hears him scratch the back of his head. He trails off.

    Because she feels bad for shutting him down, she says, “You’re not entirely wrong on that.”

    “Yeah! And I think that’s kind of cool how it all worked out. I had this whole family out there that I didn’t know about. Or, like, I _did_ know about them, but you know. It’s like something to fall back on?”

    Rose winces visibly.

    2:13

    “Do you care if I ask you a question?”

    Rose opens her eyes. Inside the glass columns, whole nebulae are collapsing in on themselves.

    “Go ahead.”

    “What was your mom actually like?”

    Any last fight leaves her, and all at once Rose feels entirely deflated. “She was an indefatigable sort of kind. You could do anything and she’d still have something nice to say about you.” Rose massages her temple. “She might have been the smartest person I knew. For all I tried to seem like I knew what I was talking about… none of it came close. She knew so much we didn’t. Even about SBURB, I think.”

    Dave makes no attempt to heckle her for years of griping over Dr. Lalonde. Rose appreciates his tact.

    “Do you think we would have gotten along?”

    This surprises her. Rose lifts her hand away from her face and looks at Dave. Blue and red blends into purple and makes his skin match his pajamas. Though his eyes are covered she can see the worried set of his mouth, the twisted knot of his eyebrows, and suddenly she agrees that they look very much alike.

    Everything hurts, physically and otherwise. There is no cell service out here to tell Jade how sorry she is, how afraid, how she might find her restless spirit in the dream bubbles. But at the very least she is not alone. Her family has not been wiped out. She still has her brother.

    Rose nods. “I think she would have adored you.”

    He plays it off, but she can tell he’s terribly relieved. The lines in his forehead iron themselves out, and his shoulders relax. “At least that makes someone.”

    0:29

    “Dave? Thank you for coming out here with me.”

    He shrugs. “Wasn’t gonna throw you to the wolves.”

    “No – really. For following me all the way out here and making sure I wasn’t alone. I would have choked out here without you.” Her words are rushed, more desperate as the seconds tick down. “Thank you for caring that much.”

    Dave cocks his head and looks at her. “Of course. That’s kinda what friends do.”

    Rose lifts her hand. To what? To touch his arm, to shake his hand, to ensure she doesn’t die in her own vacuous company? He moves to accept her hand on his shoulder, but it just hovers between them.

    “I’m very afraid.”

    0:00

 

4/13/2009 6:36 PM PST

    Hot fire is raging atop Harley Manor, and Bec is standing over his favorite human.

    Against the inferno Jack Noir is snarling, the mangy black fur of his arm wet with his accomplice’s blood. Let us say that the gold of his Ring is glinting in the light, but let us not say that Jade can see it, for unfortunately Jade has met with death by snapped spine.

    He looks sort of like a knight in shining armor, our little First Guardian. His glowing green fur sticks out of the chinks in his armor. Jack moves towards Becquerel to draw his sword and claim the body underneath him, but does not know how he’ll go about it – if they have the same powers, what then? He thinks too hard about it. When he gets too close, Bec jumps forward and sinks his teeth into Jack’s hand.

    It happens quickly. Jack flings his hand back with a horribly humanlike scream of pain, and then Bec vanishes with Jade.

    His first instinct is the Quest Bed – that’s where these kids are supposed to die, right? Ah, but there’s no dream self to take over! Bec chastises himself – in his own sort of way – for letting those women leave that island without the body in the attic. What a crucial detail! Bec supposes that the loss of the island was all an equal disaster. There were so many good places to sunbathe. But this is beside the point! Jade doesn’t have forever! He scans the session for somewhere else she can lie, someplace else stamped with the seal of Space. All of the Incipisphere blasts past his eyes, each image with perfect clarity. Where to put her?

    Eureka! There’s another crypt! Bec carries his favorite human across the Medium and into the blown-out shell of Prospit, where the catacombs of so many cathedrals have emptied into the same mutual core. Inside are two painted slabs, one black and one blue, the blue one cleft down the middle with a deep fracture – no one needs this one anymore. Gently he unravels his sprite tail and lies Jade on the black stone. Her head knocks against it a little hard, but he figures no worse damage can be done.

    It takes a moment for anything to happen. It’s as if the crypt is thinking, _Really? Didn’t think you’d need me for anything_. But then it hisses to life like a burner being switched on, and Jade’s body lights up with green.

    Satisfied, Bec looks up and examines the sky. The Scratch will finish raking through this session in only minutes. He hopes Skaia will find it in its busy schedule to finish upgrading his master.

    Becquerel lifts one paw to wash it, then remembers that Earth dogs don’t do that sort of thing. Without a planet to guard anymore, he is already forgetting how he’s supposed to act. Even after being introduced to Tesseract, it was sort of hard to get into the whole “dog” thing. Not to mention Old Man Harley giving him a gender. What is a boy, anyway? Becquerel contemplates this in as sophisticated a manner as he can before the ascension of Jade Harley rudely interrupts him.

    His tongue lolls out in instinctual happiness over seeing her alive and well. She looks so marvelous and shiny now, her hair dark and gleaming as she unleashes it from her godhood. Black does not suit her as pastels do, but Bec cannot see in color, so it is all the same to him. And now our knighted puppy must switch his narrative point of view back to Jade, seeing as his scattered thought process is not doing the job.

    “Thanks for the assistance, Bec,” Jade says. “I didn’t mean to crash and burn quite so badly.”

    She scratches him under the chin, and he wags his sprite tail. From her sylladex she pulls out a little frame of glass that she nicked from the basement – something a certain troll told her would be crucial in escaping the session. With unsure hands the Witch of Space sizes the window up a hundredfold until they can see their reflections inside of it, and then Jade smiles down at her dog.

    “I’m going to need you a lot from now on. What do you say about helping me transport some planets out of here?”

 

 

4/13/2009 7:36 PM PST

    It’s impossible. It’s impossible, and terrible, and the worst thing to ever happen. Rose swoons in her own melodrama and lets go of her temples, allowing the insight of her new Seer powers to sink into the background. Above them the newborn Green Sun burns.

    “So?” someone asks. Ah, right. She needs to answer them.

    “We’re going to be here for a while,” she breathes. “And if we trust that the others are hitching a separate ride, we will not be seeing them for some time.”

    Dave shifts in his new sneakers. Rose thinks the red is over the top, but her orange might be worse. “So give us a timeframe, Big Bird.”

    “Three years,” she says. It’s painful to say. Dave recoils, but the trolls blink back at her.

    “Isn’t that only a few weeks? A year is like two of those, right?” Karkat responds. His voice is like gravel, like he’s just getting over a sore throat.

    Rose’s eyes dart nervously between the nonhumans in their party – it’s sort of giving her uncanny valley vibes to look at their almost-but-not-quite-humanoid faces. “Yes, only a couple. Only fifty-two or so.”

    The collective morale of the meteor sinks to subarctic levels.

    Newfound shame bubbles inside of her and fizzles into an unpleasant tingling in her toes. How does one tally up the many faux pas Rose has committed today? One – went on a suicide mission without best friend’s (?) knowledge. Two – allowed bomb to go off in her selfsame presence, a grave addition to Sin Number One. Three – dawdled on wet, dark meteor too long to catch up with the team’s Prospit dreamers. And the overarching Four – kissed best friend (?) without ever reappearing again.

    And now it’s going to be three years. Three years for Jade to resent and regret and _stew_ , and….

    Dave takes her by the sleeve, and Rose is startled out of her brooding. He points at a point in front of them, and it’s so similar to the color of the Sun that Rose can’t see what he’s drawing her attention to. Then she sees it. Something is coming through the portal.

 

 

4/13/2009 7:34 PM PST

    “Are you sure you won’t go?” John pleads. Jade nods.

    “This puppy simply cannot be trusted to steer this thing alone for three years. And after all he’s done for me, I can’t leave him. It would break his heart!” Jade pats Bec’s side, and the dog whines for emphasis. “I know it’s going to be very hard, but that’s why I’m letting you have the choice of leaving.”

    John shakes his head. Currently, the shell of Prospit is hurtling at amazing speeds towards a fenestrated wall three years away. Their party has come to rest on the flat roof of Prospit’s portrait gallery, where a glass roof is separating them from a long corridor of royal statues. It’s a little dizzying. “Well, I’m not changing my mind. If my sorta-sister stays, I stay too.”

    “You’re very kind. Now finish your letter! We’re leaving soon.”

    Davesprite hovers over them trying to read their heartfelt messages, but Jade playfully shoves him away and chooses a clean page out of her old _Squiddles!_ diary from third grade. She thinks for a while about what to write, then settles for something simple. This is not to say she’s being blasé – on the contrary, she is very close to tears. But with the cacophony of so many living beings around her, it’s crucial to stay composed. While she writes, Davesprite heckles John for being left-handed.

    It’s been hard to establish any of this as real life, and maybe this is why Jade is ready to say goodbye to Rose for three years. She cannot see any good in the decision. She cannot see it as a learning experience, a lesson in patience, or any other virtue. It will hurt. It will hurt so, so much. But her dream is still clinging like film to the back of her mind, and it makes Rose feel closer than she is.

    What did Jade dream of as she lay in fire and brimstone, coasted across the cold black void with her skeleton rift in twain? It started off as a childhood dream, something out of a movie, something slowed down and sepia-colored like a home video on a glitchy VHS tape. It begins on a playground set, one of those monsters of metal that were always such a falling hazard. Jade is hanging by her legs from the highest bar, her hair dangling to touch the lower bars. Everything is upside down. It smells like playgrounds do – dirt and plastic and asphalt. An adult is standing by, some teacher to tell Jade to upright herself. But as the blood rushes to her head she is only conscious of the one life underneath her, looking up at her as if her gaze alone will keep Jade suspended in safety. In the dream, she gets only the barest glance at Rose as her glasses slide to the very tip of her nose.

    And then it melted into a dream bubble, and Jade was forced back into business. At the very least, she learns that Rose has not died for good.

    John begins stuffing his letter into a plastic bucket that Bec coughed up for him. Jade recognizes it as the one Jude uses to wash his car. It occurs to her that she still has fourteen missed calls from him, thirty missed calls from Joey, and innumerable texts from both. After this, she should go home and introduce John to his siblings. Maybe it would take the edge off.

    “Is that all you’re going to write, dear?” Nannasprite asks. Jade jumps at the touch of her gelatinous blue hand.

    “Yes, I’m sure. It’ll get the point across.”

    Nanna nods at this answer and coasts over to John, breaking up the bickering between the boys. Jade has been told that this woman is her mother. She meets this knowledge with relative apathy. In her experience, it has always been hard to differentiate mothers and grandmothers.

    She folds the note and drops it into the bucket. At her command Becquerel begins to flash like a green and yellow hole punched out of reality, and with her best baseball throw, Jade hurls the parcel halfway across the universe.

 

 

4/13/2009 7:37 PM PST

    It comes as a disappointment that what comes through the portal is nothing sentient – Rose won’t lie. But as soon as she learns it’s correspondence from Prospit, she pushes her way to the vanguard. As Karkat reads off a large poster full of John’s blue handwriting, Rose kicks its container over and upends it.

    Inside is a singular slip of paper, folded over only once. It flits out cartoonishly slow and lands gently on the concrete. Rose snatches it up. It’s very little. The pen lines can be felt like braille through the other side. Rose recognizes the writing.

    John’s message is drowned out as her shaking fingers unfold it. His poster can be read over again and again in her own time – but somehow, this message feels like it will disintegrate in her hands as soon as she reads it. The paper is tinted green, and a Squiddle framed with bubbles is printed in the corner. Rose’s eyes dart all over the page, absorbing singular letters and absorbing none of them. When she finally calms down, Rose takes a deep breath and reads it fully. What is written makes her laugh aloud, and all at once she starts to cry.

 

Meet me in the dream bubbles.

     <3 Jade

 

 

           


End file.
